Place, Embodiment, and Sound with Treva Legassie and Kristin Rodier
Amplified is an audio blog series about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. This month, we're sharing a conversation between Treva Legassie and Kristin Rodier, two participants from Amplify's first ever podcasting school that took place in spring 2024. Treva and Kristin interview each other about the audio works they created during the week-long school, and we take a listen to both works.
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0:00 [Intro Music].
Natalie Dusek 0:14
Welcome to Amplified, an audio blog, a podcast about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. I'm Natalie Dusek, Amplify's project assistant and your host for today. In the spring of 2024 Amplify hosted our first ever podcast school aimed at emerging scholars from across Canada, we hosted a cohort of podcast minded grad students and professors and worked with them on how to podcast their research. From this school came friendship, connection and even more excitement about podcasting. Reflecting on this first iteration of this school, today, I'm sharing interviews between two participants, Treva Legassie and Kristen Rodier. I had them interview each other about their experience at the school and how it feels to work in the medium of audio. Before each interview, you'll hear the final deliverable they each created, which they'll then discuss. Treva's work, Remembering like Water, which you'll hear first, takes us through the landscape of SFU's Burnaby campus and Kristen's work, which you'll hear second, is a trailer for her co hosted podcast, Thinking Bodies a dit do it together. Podcast sharing the sounds of feminist philosophy. In this conversation, they'll dig into inspirations for each piece, talk about future, dreams and hopes, and reflect on their time at our podcast school. Thanks for being here.
Treva Legassie 1:34
I got lost trying to trace a straight line. The architecture of the institution doesn't encourage us to get lost, but we often do. Maybe following a straight line isn't the best pathway. Walk with me. Take the stairs up. Note your steps as concrete becomes horizon and sky. A quadrangle is a four sided enclosure, especially when surrounded by buildings. Where does the desire to enclose and contain come from? Maybe you already know. See yourself being seen. Imagine who is watching. Walk forward to the reflection pond. Follow me as I step along the designated path, the blocks of suspended concrete guide our way. Water is enclosed on four sides. I'm looking down into the liquid mirror, wondering what would happen if I slipped and fell in maybe I lose my balance on purpose so that I could touch the water for a moment. Water connects me to memory. What does water remember? Remembering like water, complicates the colonial past and traces present and multivalent futures, forming relations with what is still present and bubbling up from below. Before the railway, highway and sidewalk, the Wild Rose, Yarrow and sweet grass. Before the classrooms, concrete and pipeline, the Arbutus tree berries and horse tail before the reservoir the river. Keep walking as you walk, listen to the sounds around you. What do you hear? What comes forward in the absence of sound? Listen without trying to capture. Traveling up the mountain our driver observed, if we can remember the history of Terry Fox, then why not the true history of Canada. Look for a place where water's memory is expressed. Sometimes bodies of water exceed their boundaries. Flood is the word they use. But in fact, it's not flooding. It's remembering, remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
[transition music] Hi. I'm Treva Legassie. My pronouns are she/they, and I'm a curator, an artist and educator based in Tkaronto, treaty 13 territory. And my work as an artist has been oriented around public spaces, in particular, thinking about urban natural spaces, or what I'm describing as kind of wild zones, thinking about those spaces in cities that kind of defy or push back against human development and settler desires to control land and nature and environment. And my research creation PhD, I'll just talk about briefly, was an online exhibition and walk along the lower Don River in Toronto, where I collaborated and worked with three sound and video artists. So this was where I sort of really started thinking more about how sound might be integrated into my practice. And for that exhibition, the research was held by walking on site, thinking about walking as research practice, noticing and also tracing written and documented histories, in particular that around the 1886 Don improvement project, and then thinking about how, through curatorial practice, to tell counter narratives to stories of urban development that really celebrate things like improvement or progress to the detriment of environment and environmental systems. So more broadly, I think my research is really interested in place and thinking about and valuing embodied and incidental knowledge, and how that relates to my work as an artist and a curator.
Kristin Rodier 6:57
So tell me about your work that you created during the amplify podcast school in May of 2024,
Treva Legassie 7:04
Right. I was really inspired initially just by being on the campus. I think it was my first time there at the Burnaby campus at SFU. So I feel like a lot of us were feeling that way, even in just navigating the space, learning, figuring out where to meet. So I was really thinking a lot about being in that space, thinking about the campus, thinking about the architecture, which was incredibly present throughout the time that we were there. And further to that, thinking about how architectures mediate bodies, inflect our experiences, and how we might come to experience space through sound and listening. And we had the opportunity to do some field recording. So I was thinking a lot about that attuning to this place by way of walking, which is very much a part of my practice, but also through the additional lens of listening and really paying attention to the sounds of the space.
Kristin Rodier 8:10
Oh, when I was listening to your piece again, it reminded me of the sound walk and the conversation that we had around the campus and just thinking about what we hear and but also what we don't hear. That was a theme that I thought was really shown through in your piece.
Treva Legassie 8:29
Thanks, yeah. And I was really inspired by Milena [Droumeva]'s work and the sound walk that we were able to do, and that was early on, so I feel like that definitely inflected my experience over the course of the week that we were together. So yeah, I was thinking about sound in a new way, and then also trying to fold that into my practice as an artist, which is mainly working in visual media. So I was thinking about how to translate my thinking and way of working that's very visual. I do some work around collage and how that might be applied to sound. So I was trying to imagine like how to create a collage through sound, pulling together all the things that I was thinking about and experiencing at that moment in time, the concepts, the references, my personal reflections. And also coming off of just kind of newly finishing my PhD as well, I was thinking about the site based work that I was doing in Toronto, and which was oriented really a lot around water. So I was also kind of being drawn to places where I was noticing water on campus, so I was really like swirling with ideas in my head at that time.
Kristin Rodier 9:51
Yeah, it's really interesting how sound, at least for the way I'm experiencing your piece and your use of sound really transported me back to campus. So hearing the birds, and also some of that industrial noise, and also the kinds of echoing off of these buildings that you're talking about, the quadrangle, and the way that there's this contained these contained straight lines and squares, and also the reflection and the reflecting, how it contains water, it contains space. And so I really get that 360 you know, fullness from your from your sound. That's what I really, really connected to, sort of brought me back to when we were in school, in our podcasting school.
Treva Legassie 10:47
Nice. I love that [laughs]. That's amazing. And I was remembering as I re listened to mine as well. I was, like, really drawn back. And I remember doing a lot of the walking. It was really rainy and gray. So I sort of like had some of that visualization too. And, you know, really wet footsteps and how the echoing was shaped, also by the weather. So not only the architectural environment, but also the weather, and how that impacted, like my listening, and also the way that I was interpreting the space. So that's great. I'm glad that it came through as well, and going back and listening to the work again.
Kristin Rodier 11:28
And something that I think too, really struck me from your work was this idea of memory in water. And so if we take water and we put it in this perfect square for human purpose of reflecting this flat, smooth and contained water reflecting, to us, it takes the memory out of it in a way. It doesn't let the water shape its its environment. Or, do you know what I'm saying? So that was just so interesting to me, to sort of be transported to something wet through sound, thinking about that physicality anyway. I'm really, really interested in, you know, how you're you're moving this forward, or are you thinking of moving it forward, doing more audio work, maybe not a podcast in a sort of traditional sense, but sort of more work with sound?
Treva Legassie 12:27
Absolutely, I was really inspired by my time and also by, I think we were nervous at the beginning. A lot of us by having to make something in such a short amount of time, some people had clear ideas. Some people did not coming in to the podcasting school, so I feel like I was just really inspired and went with my gut as a visual artist and trying to make a sound work. And I loved the experience that I found it was a really amazing new way for me to engage with public space, cities in particular, that's of interest to me through that layer of sound. So really kind of like moving away from prioritizing the visual or reimagining the visual as it's inflected by sound. So I have some plans. It's early stages, but yeah, I'd love to make more work like this. I've been thinking about, I did my PhD in Montreal, lived close to the Lachine Canal, which is a really kind of complicated urban natural wild space where there's also this push and pull between control of water ,water exceeding its boundaries. So I'd love to potentially make a work there in that context.[transition music]
Kristin Rodier 13:54
[Sound fx of beads clinking] [Laughter] Okay, wait, I miss it every time. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. Do you want me to [laughter]
Anna Mudde 14:20
Welcome to Thinking Bodies with me, Anna Mudde
Kristin Rodier 14:22
And me, Kristen Rodier, we are two feminist philosophers who love the sounds of feminist philosophy. We are building a philosophy podcast that is also a feminist DIY experiment,
Anna Mudde 14:36
Maybe even a DIT experiment, doing it together.
Kristin Rodier 14:40
So we're going to be talking about feminist philosophy, ideas that we really love,
Anna Mudde 14:45
And thinking too about the ways that we think about bodies and also the ways that bodies think.
Kristin Rodier 14:52
Bodies do think, and that's what we're going to do together. [sound fx of beads clinking]
Anna Mudde 15:01
I think about how bodies think and know the material world, how they know other bodies, how bodies teach bodies to do things in the world, and how bodies express concepts, which is what we often talk about in philosophy. Well, I often think of my own craft practice. So that involves knitting, and knitting, once you get sort of the hang of it, your body kind of can often do parts of it automatically [sound fx of beads clinking].
Kristin Rodier 15:29
Well, I've always been working around questions of feminist resistance. So how do we enact whether together or collectively or relationally? How do we enact resistance to oppression? It's all around us. How do we do that in ways that don't re inscribe the very oppression we're trying to resist? I think it's really, really difficult, and one of the things I'm thinking about is art, and I'm thinking about how we can and I'm not talking about paintings in a museum. I'm talking about ways that we can bring concepts to life through embodying performances, through sound and through all kinds of different ways of crafting relationships, just a little project [laughter]. \
Anna Mudde 16:14
Yeah, you'll be done next month. [laughter] [sound fx of beads clinking]
Kristin Rodier 16:24
I'm excited, Anna. How are we going to do a feminist philosophy podcast differently?
Anna Mudde 16:31
To start, we're asking feminist philosophers, wherever they may be, to go to our website, thinkingbodiespod.com, and submit short voice clips for us to collage with.
Kristin Rodier 16:41
So join Anna and I as we think together and we weave in this philosophy voices together and have a conversation where we're filling in the gaps of our own knowledge, reading new philosophy together and finding joy in what we love about philosophy. Go to thinkingbodiespod.com for more information. [Transition music]
So I'm Kristen Rodier. My pronouns are she/her. I'm an Associate Professor now of Philosophy at Athabasca University. My research area is interdisciplinary. I'm a philosopher at heart, but I now work a lot on media and Cultural Studies. I write a lot about the body and the body changing over time, habituation, the body and habituation, but how that all relates to oppression. So how are we formed? How do we form each other? And I've been thinking a lot about the fat body and how the fat body is understood, valued, lived and occupied, related to felt, all these kinds of embodied dimensions and yeah, I've been publishing a lot about sort of dominant narratives and stereotypes around fat people's sexual agency and violence, as well as tensions between a sort of mainstream body positivity and of fat politics, let's say, and how that crops up in lots of different areas, one being sort of textbooks, one being television shows I'm writing right now about a lifetime dramedy, one of these shows that kind of is under the radar, but says a lot. So that's kind of what I've been doing. My connection to Amplify and podcasting is that I went to this amazing week long school in 2024 and as someone who's been in a permanent role post PhD for a little while, the opportunity to learn a new way to communicate my Research was no less than thrilling for me at this stage in my life and career. So it was really awesome. So I was able to go to this school.
Treva Legassie 19:31
All right, tell me about the work you created during the amplify podcast school. What inspired you to make this piece?
Kristin Rodier 19:38
So the work I created at the podcast school was a trailer that was the that was the output, let's say the product the output of the the podcast school, but the work that I did during the school was so foundational for what I've been able to do since to really have that time to think about the why, why am I? Am I doing this? What, who am I trying to connect with? What makes my podcast? My podcast? What do I want to communicate and then being able to talk to mentors about how I'm going to do that, right? Am I going to flip on a microphone and let it fly, you know? Or are there techniques I learned, so many different techniques, to integrate perspectives, to ask questions, and so really, you know, the output was that I made a trailer for my podcast, but the bigger output was that I figured out what it's going to be, and I came up with all of those foundational bits. You could call it a mission statement, in a way, because every time I'm not sure what to do on the next episode or whatever, I touch base with that. What am I doing? Why? Who's it for? And that grounds what we continue to do. And so the inspiration for me is I want to connect with people. There's a lot of isolation in research and writing. I want to talk to people. I want to communicate. And I also want a new format, and I want that format to be more accessible outside of, you know, peer reviewed journal articles, $40 to download this document, or whatever it is, and so. So that was, that was my big inspiration.
Treva Legassie 21:33
Nice. I love that you talk about connection when you describe your work, because I feel like I felt really connected to you again in listening to the trailer, I feel like you crafted so much joy and a sense of play in dealing with feminist philosophy. I wonder if you can talk more about if that was intentional or like if you might sort of continue on with that as a practice in future iterations of the podcast.
Kristin Rodier 22:03
Yeah, so it's really important to my co host and I that we are able to communicate what we love about feminist philosophy. It sounds corny, but it's what keeps me involved and invested, and if I can put that into how we communicate it, I feel like it will draw people into the ideas as well. Because I find philosophy terribly funny. I find it to be really good for connecting with people on a deeper level. For me, the conversations that I've had through my you know, concepts and feminist philosophy have been some of the best moments of my life, and I want to share that. So Anna and I, my co host, and I try to bring some of that humor, but also some of that connection. There are points in in some of the episodes that we've been able to make that are really difficult and and we try to sit with that leave some space for that, because a lot of times I sort of feel like things can get cut too quick to a joke, and I don't think our listener really needs that. You know, I think I imagine a really multi dimensional audience member. And yeah, so I've really enjoyed it, it's, it's um, it. I've, I've been so proud of what we've been able to put together. And I, I It's corny to say it, but it really feels that way.
Natalie Dusek 23:38
Nice. And I also was really struck by how you were thinking about embodied sounds and tactility. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. Were those beads? It was really also satisfying to listen to. And I forget, I think you spoke about it, but what the materiality of that was, it sounded very tactile. [sound fx of beads clinking]
Kristin Rodier 24:01
Yeah we ended up changing. I really liked the beads, the version that we have, you know, on Apple podcasts now, or whatever is it has some playing, some ukulele. But part of the inspiration is thinking about that. You know, the podcast is called Thinking Bodies, right? So to try to bring in materiality when your medium is thought, is very difficult. And so I was just trying to ground something in, some something physical to remind us of the ways that bodies make sound, whether that's a human body. You know, there's a lot of laughter in the pod. We also have some nature sounds in it, some at some times, but yeah, it's it's really tough to bring in that materiality.
Treva Legassie 24:24
So you end with the kind of call to action in the work that you produced, you're asking a public to send in voice clips. So I wanted to know more about how that's going, and if you've extended this work, or how you've extended this work since the Amplify podcast school.
Kristin Rodier 25:21
Yeah, we have had, we've got sort of two episodes, full episodes out and one, as we say, in the prairies, in the hopper. And we've been able to get clips. But it is kind of difficult when people don't really know your podcast yet, so you're trying to get people to contribute. So there's a bit of a startup issue. So we've been working really hard getting people we know to contribute, but we have had some feedback even through our website. People listen to the episode and then send a little little email message, and I'm experimenting and extending what we've done so far by we're now going to go to a conference and and and record a live episode. We hope that's that's one of our new next plans, because we've gotten some nice recording equipment similar to what we used at the Amplify podcast school, and so we want to do an on location Live episode at a conference in March. And then that would be kind of our regular form, but sort of playing with it a little bit. And if we can't get on the conference program, we're going to call it not live, but on location, we'll recorded in our hotel rooms with other philosophers. So that's that's what I've got coming up. You know, now we're trying to play with the medium a little bit. [Outro music]
Natalie Dusek 26:49
Thanks for listening to Amplified, a podcast, an audio blog about the sounds of scholarship coming to you from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. If you have comments or additional thoughts on our conversation today or on any of Amplify's initiatives, please reach out, make sure to follow us on Twitter, aka X, Instagram, or subscribe to our email newsletter on the website for updates and to keep in touch. See you next time.
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Treva Legassie (she/they) is a curator, artist and educator born and based in Tkarón:to, Treaty 13 territory. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University. Her research-creation dissertation takes the form of a curated online exhibition walk that speaks to and from ‘The Narrows’ of Wonscotonach (the Don River) in Tkarón:to. A channelized section of the Lower Don River, The Narrows, has historically been a site of conflict; from the city’s industrial development around the waterway to its use as a site for discarding waste and detritus, a space of refuge, and more recently as a contested site of ecological restoration and rehabilitation. Engaging in a curatorial practice as research-creation, Legassie tends to the many histories and interlocutors of The Narrows as a borderland in Tkarón:to Indigenous and settler colonial histories. As a curator, their process values embodied and incidental knowledge and a commitment to Land and its vast complexity. Legassie is co-director of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective. Her writing has been published in RACAR, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, PUBLIC Journal, The Senses & Society, and AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. She has also curated new media based exhibitions such as improvement becomes a wall, and the river meanders still (2022), Femynynytees (2018), #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines and co-ordinated Cheryl Sim’s YMX: Land and Loss after Mirabel.
Kristin Rodieris a recently tenured and promoted Associate Professor of Philosophy at Athabasca University, located in Amiskwaciwâskahikan / ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ, land belonging to the Plains Cree, Woodland Cree, Beaver Cree, Ojibwe, and the Métis people. She is thrilled to be pursing her passion for philosophy at an open and flexible distance education institution. Her current writing explores a critical phenomenology of the body that intersects fatness, gender, ability, and race, and her research is grounded in feminist philosophy and investigates changing selfhood in light of time, habit, and gender oppression—especially as it relates to the fat body. She also writes on sexual violence against fat people, fat temporality, and Simone de Beauvoir. She has a second research program in the scholarship of teaching and learning, focusing on how e-learning interventions and universal design can foster positive academic integrity cultures. Linkedin page, PURE profile, google scholar.
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Intro + Outro Theme Music: Pxl Cray – Blue Dot Studios (2016)
Written and produced by Natalie Dusek