Podcasting with VAYLA New Orleans
By Aimee Bowling
During this semester, I collaborated with Syna Pal and VAYLA New Orleans on the Spotify Podcast titled “Our Bodies, Our Stories.” While the podcast wasn’t originally our creation, we took the reins for its second and third seasons. Syna and I embarked on our podcasting journey by initially curating a list of subjects we aimed to discuss. We familiarized ourselves with VAYLA and deliberated on the impact we wished to make and the message we intended to convey to our audience for the third season. We familiarized ourselves with VAYLA and deliberated on the impact we wished to make and the message we intended to convey to our audience for the third season. Syna and I delved into research, scriptwriting, Canva graphic design, and guest interviews. We also made sure to coordinate with each other, VAYLA, and any guests we were going to have on Our Bodies, Our Stories. Despite the inherent complexities of producing a podcast episode, the process proved to be very much worth the experience.
We did not finish the third season this summer, but we published three amazing episodes, and we will continue this in the fall. We published an episode about the mental health impacts of not getting an abortion, intersex justice, and we interviewed a staff member at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Once we picked the episode topic, we brainstormed and talked about which key points we wanted to make. Two of these episodes were interviews, so we also came up with thought-provoking questions that would challenge the status quo, but also weren’t too difficult for people new to the Reproductive Justice conversation. We would then either proceed with the interview or send an episode script to our supervisor, Ellen Lu. After receiving approval, Syna and I would record the episode together, design the accompanying graphic, and subsequently release the content on both the @rjvayla Instagram account and Spotify platform.
Expressing the full scope of our efforts in words can be challenging, yet Syna and I aspire for our podcast to have a profound impact on its listeners. We hope to inspire others to engage with the cause of Reproductive Justice or simply to become better informed about the pressing issues confronting our society today. As more laws are coming that are changing the Reproductive Justice and Reproductive Health landscape, our goal is to help educate listeners on topics and inspire them to do further research themselves and get involved in the movement.