Disability Saves the World with Fady Shanouda
Amplified is an audio blog series about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. This month on Amplified, Hannah McGregor is joined by Fady Shanouda to talk about the role of podcasting in disability scholarship. Fady reflects on the creation of Disability Saves the World, a podcast born during the pandemic that opened space for disabled voices and accessible scholarship. Together, they explore how sound can be a medium for care, connection, and joy, while also breaking down barriers between researchers and audiences. Fady also introduces his latest project, Disability Disruptions, a five-part documentary podcast supported by SSHRC, which brings together activists and scholars to tackle themes of war, colonialism, grief, and disability justice through collaborative sonic storytelling.
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Natalie Dusek 0:00
[Intro Music] 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 this episode is a little bittersweet for me, because it will be my last one here with Amplify. The good news is, is that I've just wrapped up my master's degree, which means I'm moving on from SFU. I've been part of Amplify since my very first week of grad school, and working on this project has been such a joy. I'm so grateful to Hannah and Stacey for all of their support and to everyone I've had the chance to collaborate with along the way. Who knows, maybe I'll find my way back here someday, but in the meantime, I'll definitely be tuning in to keep up with all the amazing work Amplify continues to put out. For today's episode, Hannah McGregor sits down with scholar and podcaster Fady Shenouda to talk about Disability Saves the World, a project that extends academic work into sonic mediums to make scholarship more accessible, especially for disabled listeners. They explore what it means to bring lived experience into research, to center joy and care in academic spaces and humanize scholarship through sound. Fady also shares a look at his new SSHRC funded series, Disability Disruptions, a documentary style podcast that engages with themes like war, settler colonialism, care and grief while experimenting with new approaches to peer review and audio form. Thanks for being here.
Hannah McGregor 1:26
Hello!
Fady Shanouda 1:26
Thank you for having me on!
Hannah McGregor 1:27
Welcome Fady, thanks so much for coming to chat with me. I am delighted to talk to you a little bit more about your podcasting work. We've had a chance to chat about other work that you do, but I've never really gotten to like pick your brain about why podcasting, which is one of my favorite questions. So tell us a little bit about Disability Saves the World your podcasting project and what drew you to podcasting as a medium.
Fady Shanouda 1:58
So disability saves the world was invented in my sister's guest bedroom during the pandemic when I was isolated for two weeks after flying home from the UK. And I wanted to talk to my friends, but they were super busy, and it felt like one way that I could talk to my friends, but also they could get a line on their CV. And so I sort of married the two together. I came up with the name and did all the graphics and all the stuff by myself. I had so much time, my my research. At that point, my postdoc research has essentially imploded because it was about international student distress.
Hannah McGregor 2:48
Okay, so you had been doing a postdoc about international students, and the covid 19 pandemic started, and it was like, well, that's not happening now,
Fady Shanouda 2:58
Precisely. And as someone who had listened to podcasts for a long time, I thought it would be a good way of communicating some of the really important things that disabled people were contributing to this pandemic. Hence the name of the podcast, disability saves the world. But I think behind all of this. The real reason why podcasting seems to me like a really important part of scholarship is that as a disabled person, I accessed theory and journal articles and papers and all these things through them being read to me by very old now, resources like Kurzweil or dictation on my MacBook. And so the idea of, like, scholarship being extended to sonic scholarship, or, you know, academic podcasting, was a natural trajectory for me as someone who had always already had things read to me. Now, of course, podcasting is very different from a book being read, or, you know, an audio book, yeah, but there are similarities, enough so that it seemed like a natural step,
Hannah McGregor 4:13
Yeah, yeah. That just like, I like processing information sonically. This is a way that things feel accessible to me, and we've so much in the contemporary academy, foreclosed the possibilities for scholarship around the written word, and it's like no shade to the written word. Big fan, cool technology not the only way we can share ideas.
Fady Shanouda 4:37
Yeah, and and before, you know, Kurzweil was thousands of dollars this program that disabled students use in order to access they had to, like, scan the pages. It had to be in the right PDF format. There were all these like barriers to accessing scholarship in audio format. And now, we've like encouraged students to use podcasts. Professors are more likely to put it on their syllabi. And you know, your leadership in the area of sonic scholarship has opened it up now to so much new opportunities for people to actually disseminate their knowledge, their findings, right through this medium.
Hannah McGregor 5:20
Yeah. So tell me about some of the if there are any episodes of Disability Saves the World that stand out to you, where you were like, Oh, what an exciting conversation that I wouldn't have had if I wasn't making a podcast.
Fady Shanouda 5:34
I was just looking over the list today before I came on. There are only 22 episodes. And one of the reasons why Disability Saves the World hasn't continued since 2022 is because it's too expensive to create a fully accessible podcast. Is about $500 an episode, if I you know, with my editor, I did the first couple of ones, everything by myself, but it became too much when I got this job. But the last episode, Laura Monro. Episode, someone who with Lucy Costa at the empowerment Council and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, tells us about what it's like to teach future psychiatrists mad studies, hmm, like, What insight, first of all, that there is a course that exists where, where psychiatrists are being taught this, you know, novel, new critical approach to mental health, and that I get to talk to one of the teachers of that founders and teachers of that, course, it's fantastic. She also happens to be a fat activist, and so just like you know, sprinkled in some other amazing conversations we had,
Hannah McGregor 6:51
I love that. I love that too. Because when you're doing scholarship through conversation, there is this opportunity to like you can be a bit more capacious, you can be a little more elusive, right? You can, you can bring in the body, the lived experience, with so much more ease.
Fady Shanouda 7:07
I mean, I did that. I mean, the podcast was also divided into two parts. There was always an academic part, but part two of all the displaces with episodes about coming to know the researcher. So I asked them about their academic crush. I asked them about their you know, like they're like a funny story, like, I asked them these things so we can get to know them a little bit more. So it also attempts to break sort of a fourth wall that I think exists between the researcher and the research. And some people like that, and some people don't, and that's totally fine. I get people wanting to be private and to maintain that separation.
Hannah McGregor 7:44
Yeah, yeah, that is important for some people. And also, I do wonder sometimes how that like persona of the expert has contributed a little bit to suspicion of the expert. It's like, we're like, we're not people. It's like, oh.
Fady Shanouda 8:00
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, I remember one person specifically, like, brought up Parker Posey, and this is before, like, the White Lotus of it all. And I, you know, it was so great that we've had like, an entire segment on Parker Posey in the podcast, because we both think she's, like, absolutely fabulous. And I just think that like brings a little bit of like joy to to the podcast, to the to the topics we're bringing about, and does, in fact, I think, humanize us, and I think encourages the public to see us as people who are just asking really difficult questions, but who are also living our lives at the same time?
Hannah McGregor 8:44
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I mean, I want to go on a tangent about Parker Posey with you now, but I'm not going to, instead, I'm going to say you are working on a new podcasting project.
Fady Shanouda 8:56
Yes, it's very different from Disability Saves the World. It's called Disability Disruptions, and it is from a SSHRC grant that was awarded to Dr Kelly Fritsch here at Carleton University, who's a critical who's a Canada Research Chair in Disability Studies. Kelly and myself and one of our students, Megan Linton, created a five part documentary podcast series, so each one is about an hour long, and they cover topics like war, settler colonialism, care, grief. They are so amazing, in the sense that, you know, we've hired a professional audio engineer who's doing, you know, sound design for the podcast. And. We wrote these over 810, months, these five episodes, and there's, they stand alone, but they're also, you know, they interweave with one another. They include 30 disabled activists and from across Canada that we interviewed as part of the process. And they're totally different. And I'll say this project would not be possible without SSHRC funding, because it's about $75,000 if you include the student salaries, the audio engineer. You know, we even rented here, like a booth at Carleton to do all the narration. Took a whole week just to record the narration. And you know, that cost us a couple thousand dollars and it's amazing that what the engineers pick up on when it comes to sound quality, sound design. I mean, sometimes I go back and listen to Disability Saves the World, and I'm like, oh my god, audiologists, I think that's the word. People who are interested in audio must hear this and be like, God damn. Like, just get a better mic, dude.
Hannah McGregor 11:12
I mean, I think, I think interesting people who are, who are interested in sound appreciate a capacious range of kinds of sound, right? All right, that this has certainly been my experience working with like queer sound engineers you know, my my collaborator on this project, Stacey Copeland, for example, is like a trained sound engineer who knows how to get exactly that professional sound, but recognizes that that professional sound is just one of many ranges of possible sound, and that, in fact, you know, DIY sound has its own value. You know it, it is approachable. It's intimate. It, you know, opens things out. You know, it's a it's a sonic way of lowering that barrier of expertise. And you know, so, like, there's different work different sound does, but there is like to create that kind of sonically rich and complex documentary sound is, like, it's a lot of work and it's a lot of collaboration,
Fady Shanouda 12:16
Absolutely, yeah, I mean, and thank you. I really appreciate that perspective on my low quality sound podcast. I think, yeah, I think it's, that's a really wonderful analysis. Yeah, and, you know, we've talked before about now sort of peer reviewing this podcast, right? Even though it's, it's written, it's in the post production process, and what is it like to do now, peer review in this process and and we're writing a proposal to present to the UBC press to see if they're interested in sort of expanding how they're going to do things. So it's really exciting, like the idea of contributing to sonic scholarship, and, you know, not just in the production of the podcast, but also in how peer review might be done in ways that you've, you know, proposed in the past, is fantastic.
Hannah McGregor 13:20
Well, I'm really excited to see where this project goes, and I'm really excited to hear it. Thanks. When do we think it's going to be in the world?
Fady Shanouda 13:28
We are aiming for winter 2026, so we're a couple of months out. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Then all the narration done, all the all the so all the little bits are done now we just have to, sort of, we're giving it to the experts so they can add all the sound effects and all the sound design, which takes months,
Hannah McGregor 13:51
yeah, yeah, yeah. It's labor intensive.
Fady Shanouda 13:55
It is, yeah, and worth every penny,
Hannah McGregor 13:58
Thanks sound designers! [Laughs]
Natalie Dusek 14:01
Thanks for listening to Amplified: an audio blog, a podcast about the sounds of scholarship. If you have comments or additional thoughts on our conversation today or on any of Amplify's initiatives, please don't hesitate to reach out See you next time. [Outro Music]
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Fady Shanouda is a critical disability studies scholar who draws on feminist new materialism to examine disabled and mad students' experiences in higher education. His scholarly contributions lie at the theoretical and pedagogical intersections of disability, mad, and fat studies and include socio-historical examinations that surface the interconnections of colonialism, racism, ableism, sanism, and queer- and transphobia. Shanouda has published scholarly articles on disability-related issues in higher education, on Canadian disability history, and on community-based learning. He is an assistant professor at the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's and Gender Studies at Carleton University. Shanouda conducts this research diversely positioned as a disabled, fat, POC, immigrant, and settler living, working, and creating on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Algonquin nation.
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Intro + Outro Theme Music: Pxl Cray – Blue Dot Studios (2016)
Written and produced by: Natalie Dusek and Stacey Copeland