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UofWinds 446, Week 38, 2026: Field Trip, The Quiet Shush, Public Pedagogy


Good evening. I am pre-writing this newsletter on Friday night on account that I am travelling early Saturday morning, which is normally the time that I reserve for this newsletter. Now I could have been brave and risked writing issue while travelling in the VIA rail car that is removing me from Windsor, but I've opted for the option with the more reliable wifi and cell service.

Field Trip


I've made a couple of allusions that I have been working on a secret writing project and it is finally time for the big reveal: I now host a weekly radio program called Field Trip on CJAM 99.1 FM, the campus radio station for the University of Windsor. The show is mostly music but there are periodic digressions about space and place and features of the the Windsor Detroit area.

In my first live show, I talk about the largest power outage in North America and how it is only tangentially commemorated, as well as a particular hazard to local jet skiers. In the second show, I talk about Life/Light Houses, starlings, and watersheds.

I've only done a couple of live shows and so the programs are still a bit stressful to put on as I am still trying to figure out how to broadcast mixes of mp3s instead of records and CDs. But it's also been a great deal of fun and it has complete re-invigorated my music listening and reawakened the joy of new music discovery that is driven by curiosity rather than algorithm.

The Quiet Shush


As I am writing this newsletter late into the evening, I am listening to a delightful collection of night-time sounds from The Quiet Hush, a campus radio show from Cork Ireland from librarian Martin O'Connor. I learned of his show from his post, Why We Still Need Librarians and DJs in the Age of the Algorithm on the LibFocus blog.

In 2015, I wrote a post for Libfocus called Librarians are a lot like DJs. My argument was straightforward enough. Librarians and DJs are both curators. We sort through vast amounts of material, identify what we think has value, and connect people with resources they may never have discovered otherwise. Whether the medium happens to be books, journal articles, archives, podcasts or records, the underlying principle remains much the same. We help people navigate abundance.  

O'Connor isn't the only campus radio librarian DJ that I'm aware of. Corina MacDonald of McGill University hosts a program called Modular Systems on CKUT. (If you know of others, please leave a comment below!)

In this age of corporate controlled algorithms, music programming by public radio, campus radio, and listener-supported radio is more important than ever.

I'm sorry to tell you that many of the music influencers on the social media platforms are actually part of the problem. I recently listened to an episode of NPR's It's Been a Minute in which the topic discussed was "the hidden money financing your favorite songs." While learning that that some social media music influencers are taking money to promote music without disclosure was disappointing, it was this passage from this episode that gave me the most pause:

LUSE: You also talked to someone who said that it used to be more hip-hop and R&B songs that labels poured this kind of, like, secret money into. And now, it's country. What does that say to you?
SARMIENTO: I think it speaks to how so many of these trends aren't accidents, and they're intentional. And we should be aware, or at least approach them with some skepticism, when it seems like the trends that we are seeing in music or in other forms of art reflect a certain cultural or social agenda. The influencer that told me that, I was really shocked to hear that, like, you know, there was a big movement of, like, bedroom rap and protest music especially. I mean, I'm thinking during the summer of BLM, during 2020, like, hip-hop played such a core part of the musical scene and how we talked about music in, like, a racial and social context, and understanding that there's been a concerted effort from some labels to move away from that and towards country music, which maybe aligns with different political values and a different sociocultural context. I think that that says a lot about the goals of this industry and, like, what kind of politics they're in line with. And it's shocking. And I think it's concerning, because I think it's easy to look at the charts and be like, wow, that's crazy that country music, all of a sudden, is popping off. But it's like, these things aren't necessarily happening on accident.

The current top song on the BillBoard 100 is Ella Langley is "Choosing Texas". But you have to wonder, how much of "Choosing Texas" was actually a choice?

Public Pedagogy


Last year, I spend some moments wondering how I could share promotional texts to the students of my workplace/library through the largely image and video based social media channel of Instagram. I fumbled around and made a very modest mock-up using Google Sheets to create an image with dimensions that Instagram would render with the least complaint. But the results were not inspiring, even to myself, so I put the idea away.

And then this year, I stumbled upon the work of Darren Raven, a design educator from the Manchester School of Art who was able to make this Google Slides ➡️ Instagram transition work in a very striking way. And he provides a playlist as well.

The project is called Public Pedagogy and for it, it appears that - on an almost daily basis, Raven has been designing a series of small posters published as daily zine on Instagram and Google Sheets. Each zine features striking design that pose challenging questions on the nature of teaching, and many feature citations to the sources that he drawns from.

I was particularly drawn to PP240 : instagram : google sheets, which is a series of directions that ask the instructor to remove uncertainty, failure, risk, and so forth. In the background of each slide is the image of a can of soft drink. This image does so much of the work that supports Raven's suggestion that the the removal of uncertainty/failure/risk in teaching might result in learning delivered in the form of a commodity.

Some days after, I read a quotation of Wendell Berry shared on Bluesky that read, "All of the disciplines are increasingly identifiable as professionalisms, which are increasingly conformable to the aims and standards of industrialism.” And the image of a soda can immediately came to my mind.

Oh, and there's also a playlist of music that is part of this Public Pedagogy project. One track of techno for each day's zine.

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