Dr Abigail Wincott awarded international Fellowship

Dr Abigail Wincott, Associate Professor of Audio Journalism in the School of Communication, has been awarded an International Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust.

Titled 'New approaches to the context and craft of radiophonic storytelling', the 4-month fellowship funding will allow Abigail to work full time on research to better understand how producers of audio documentaries conceive of the storyworlds they create, as they interact with technology to cut and mix.

Thanks to the boom in narrative podcasting, radiophonic documentary has received increased audience attention, there are new awards and festivals, university courses and industry investment in research and development. There is increasing recognition that the craft of factual audio storytelling lacks the kind of complex, critical vocabulary that benefits documentary film-making.

During the fellowship, Abigail has been invited to work with audio documentary producers, journalists and sound engineers at RFI Labo in Paris, while based at l'Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier. Using voice notes, screen shots, observation and interviews, this work will attempt to capture the fleeting and usually unspoken judgements made during postproduction.

RFI Labo is a centre of excellence for audio production at the French International broadcaster RFI, and leaders in research and development in spatial and object based audio technology for programme-making of the future, together with Radio France, the BBC, Dolby and others.

l'Université Paul-Valéry is an arts and humanities-specialist university, and Abigail will work with interactional linguists who specialise in techniques to capture and interpret people's interactions with audio technology in media workplaces and in the home.

The fellowship brings together the normally separate fields of anglophone and francophone radio and podcast studies, and opens up possibilities for further collaborations between Falmouth and Montpellier.