The UNESCO Courier - Volume 2020, Issue 1, 2020

By developing new forms of sound narratives, podcasting has done more than breathe new life into radio. In just a few years, it has evolved into a global industry — reinventing the audio medium and allowing closer links to be forged with listeners.

Colombian guru who abused dozens of women while pretending to heal them; a Cuban writer remembering her childhood in Havana; an amateur astronomer who managed to photograph the birth of a supernova from the terrace of his house in Rosario, Argentina. These are some of the diverse stories told on Radio Ambulante, a podcast service in Spanish that for eight years has not spared the imagination or effort to reach more and more people. Carolina Guerrero, one of its founders, explains the mission of this new kind of broadcasting.

Having worked as a professional host for the radio and television station of Jilin province, one traditional Chinese broadcaster experienced an interesting transformation into a new media host. Since 2014, Shi Zhan has been practising a new form of audio storytelling — vividly recreating the history of China's ancient dynasties on Shanghai-based Himalaya FM, the country's most successful audio network.

Social media networks now make it possible for radio audiences to comment on, and even influence, radio programming. But this citizen participation and seemingly innocuous interaction comes at a price — it allows large technology companies to collect lucrative data on our behaviours.

With a freer and more intimate tone than daytime broadcasts, night-time radio has long been the privileged place for confidences delivered in the anonymity of the night. At a time conducive to imagination and solitude, these broadcasts provide listeners with a reassuring voice that seems to speak only to them. But they are now giving way to less expensive programming.

Deprived of a physical image, listeners rely on the evocative power of the voice on the radio, to immerse themselves in the story — creating mental images that facilitate concentration on what is being said.

In a sound environment that has long been dominated by men, women have been slow to carve out a place for themselves. Yet, having been assiduous listeners from the start, they have played a central role in shaping the history and content of radio.

For over a quarter of a century, one of the most recognized and trusted radio voices in India was that of Mark Tully. This British correspondent for the BBC has covered all the momentous events that marked the country's recent history, until the mid-1990s. He is a living witness of the time when radio was the main medium to reach the masses, telephone communications were unreliable, and radio recordings were made on magnetic tapes that had to be physically sent to the editorial offices.

When it comes to listening to the radio, Burkina Faso is one of the champions of sub-Saharan Africa. The proliferation of stations and the popularity of programmes that give listeners a voice, reflect the enthusiasm of the Burkinabe people for this medium.

Naliapou, the doyenne of Tumai, a Kenyan village forbidden to men, prepares for a chanting ceremony to the spirits, by coating her face with red earth mixed with animal fat.

Our image of the wild and warlike prehistoric human, which persists even today, is actually a myth, devised in the second half of the nineteenth century. Archaeological research shows that, in fact, collective violence emerged with the sedentarization of communities and the transition from a predation economy to a production economy.

Familiar yet invisible people, around 2.5 million migrants have left their homes in Central Asia to try their luck in Moscow. Most of them eke out a living doing precarious jobs. In Ayka — a feature film which won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 — Russian- Kazakh writer-director Sergey Dvortsevoy and Kazakh actress Samal Yeslyamova explore the fate of those who are willing to sacrifice everything in the hope of a better life.

A hundred years ago, on 10 January 1920, the League of Nations was born out of the rubble of the First World War. The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), UNESCO's predecessor, was created in its wake. The aim was to overcome the national egoisms that had led to the disaster, by focusing on multilateralism. This dream would not survive the inter-war period. But in an era facing challenges such as war, terrorism, economic crises and climate change, the credo of the founding fathers of the League for a more united world has not lost any of its relevance.

Two years after the #MeToo movement erupted in the United States and twenty-five years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Helen Pankhurst assesses the different waves of feminism over the last 100 years. The activist and author also writes about the roles of her great-grandmother Emmeline Pankhurst and grandmother Sylvia, leaders of the suffragette movement, who helped win British women the right to vote in the early twentieth century.