Getting through 2020 and Beyond: Siobhan McMenemy

By Amplify Team Date: March 29, 2021 Tags: Podcasting

There are a plethora of “Best of 2020” Podcast lists out there so here at Amplify we decided to do things a bit differently. Looking back at our first year as a network, we asked some of our members to reflect on the podcasts that got them through the global pandemic, revolution-filled year that was 2020.  We asked: What podcasts helped you get through 2020? What are you listening to now? What are your all-time favorites?” 

In Favorite Podcasts post #1 and post #2, Amplify podcasters María Alvarez Malvido and Kendra Cowley, and co-director Hannah McGregor shared with us their favorite podcasts to help navigate these rapidly changing pandemic times. Podcasts shaking up Canadian mainstream media through activist perspectives, and podcasts that act as a comforting and necessary invitation to “pause, lay down and just listen”. 

We hope each post will give you a glimpse into the individual team members that make up The Amplify Network. If you have a podcast that helped you get through 2020, share it with us at @AmplifyPodcasts on Twitter or send us an email, we’d love to hear from you. 

Next up in our Favourite Podcasts series, we hear from Amplify co-director and senior editor at WLU Press Siobhan McMenemy. 

Siobhan McMenemy

Podcasts invite me to listen to new voices and ideas and to think and learn about life beyond my restrictive domestic workspace and past the limitations of my perspective.

Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), hosts of All My Relations, explore Indigenous relationships to land, other-than-human creatures, and fellow human beings across Turtle Island, with episode topics including food sovereignty, fashion, racist sports mascots, Thanksgiving, and queer Indigenous identities.

Canadaland is the flagship weekly series on media criticism from the listener-supported journalistic news site of the same name. Its focus is on Canadian news and media and host Jesse Brown and colleagues ensure its widespread geographical and community coverage.

Code Switch—‘Race. In Your Face’—is a valuable NPR podcast hosted by Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji give their read on a weekly topic and engage in conversations, interviews, and non-fiction storytelling with journalists, scholars, activists, and artists on race and identity in all aspects of life.

Hannah McGregor’s Secret Feminist Agenda is a thoughtful, engaging, humorous mix of essayistic ‘minisodes’ and conversations with feminists that encourage listeners to open our minds, sharpen our listening skills, and engage with the world with social justice driving us onward.

Talk of food and music appears in most of my favourite podcasts. Home Cooking is the podcast of chef Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway, who also hosts the podcast Song Exploder. Home Cooking encourages a playful engagement with food and a shedding of fear of unfamiliar ingredients. Song Exploder allows musicians an opportunity to relive the creation of one of their influential pieces, audio layer by layer, and explain to listeners how they imagined and performed the song into being.