Bawh (بوح) is a student-produced podcast based at Al-Quds Bard College in Palestine that  taps into the transformative power of everyday people and their life stories. Every week, the podcast  tunes into Palestine in all its shapes, sizes, sounds and textures.

Bawh / بوح Podcast was an idea that grew out of a Fall 2020 course entitled, “Documentary Storytelling for Podcast and Radio,” taught by Dr. Laura Menchaca Ruiz. Students in the course produced thoughtful and unique audio stories about everyday life in Palestine. The experience of creating these stories led students to become interested in developing a college podcast that would allow their stories to travel beyond the classroom.

With support from the Experimental Humanities’ Community-Facing Projects Grant and the Research and Professional Opportunities Grant, we successfully established a student-produced podcast and created a pilot season of twelve 15-20 minute student-produced episodes.

The primary purpose of the podcast was twofold: To diversify the kinds of stories available about Palestine, offering complex and engaging narratives that articulate the beauty and challenges of Palestinian life, and to equip students with the resources, tools and skills they needed to tell nuanced and compelling audio stories about their own communities. In this spirit, the podcast published long-form audio stories rooted in the techniques of nonfiction storytelling. We drew from, expanded, and reworked rough cuts of audio stories already created by students in Fall 2020, as well developed a few brand new audio stories for the pilot season. As part of the production team, students curated a podcast season of twelve 15-20 minute episodes that were released between October 2021 – January 2022.

Participation on the podcast production team was open to students who had some experience producing audio stories, either through the aforementioned course, or through another similarly situated media studies production course.

The final team included the following:

• Shams Abureehan (Media Studies ‘21), Art Design
• Majd Aburrob (Media Studies ‘21), Music & Sound Design
• Sariyah Abuzant (Human Rights & Int’l Law ‘21), Senior Producer
• Layan Dajani (Media Studies ‘23), Logo Design
• Maya Hrizat (Literature & Society ‘23), Senior Producer
• Omayma Sbeih (Human Rights & Int’l Law ‘23), Senior Producer
• Amani Zaher (Literature & Society ‘22), Senior Producer

In addition to stories from the Senior Producers, we also featured stories from:

• Shams Abureehan (Media Studies ‘21), Producer
• Majd Aburrob (Media Studies ‘21), Producer
• Yazan Oweineh (Media Studies ’22), Producer
• Tala Salem (Media Studies ’21), Producer

The podcast was produced with the support and guidance of AQB faculty member, Dr. Laura Menchaca Ruiz.

Website by Element Media

Special Thanks to Danielle Bovee and Rana Hajaj for their support with the buzzsprout subscriptions, and to Raneen Rizk, Hamdi Ghanem and Osama Ayyad for their support with financials.