Sonic Citizenship: Podcasts and the Making of Afro-German Community Open Access
Louis-Ugbo, Joanna (Spring 2026)
Abstract
This thesis examines how contemporary Afro-German podcasts function as sites of identity formation, community-building, and political engagement. While existing scholarship on Afro-German activism has focused primarily on print culture, literature, and in-person organizing, this project argues that podcasts constitute a critical, yet underexamined, medium through which Afro-German identity is produced and negotiated in the present. Drawing on the concept of sonic citizenship, the thesis demonstrates how belonging emerges through practices of listening, speaking, and mediated sound. Methodologically, this study treats podcasts as primary sources and employs a phenomenological approach to media analysis. Through close, time-based readings of selected episodes, it reconstructs the listening experience in detail, attending to tone, pacing, hesitation, laughter, and conversational dynamics. This approach reveals how meaning is generated through content, but also through the sonic and relational qualities of the medium.
The analysis centers on two podcasts: TUPODCAST (hosted by Tupoka Ogette) and Afrikanah (hosted by Julie Ngoya Tshidibu). Each podcast offers a distinct mode of engaging Afro-German identity. TUPODCAST constructs identity through affective recognition and collective memory, creating intimate spaces of shared experience, while Afrikanah frames identity as a process of self-reflection and development, emphasizing embodiment and cyclical temporality. Together, these case studies demonstrate that Afro-German identity is not a fixed or unified category, but a dynamic and relational process shaped by historical context, material conditions, and media form. Podcasts function as counter-public platforms, enabling Afro-German creators to circulate narratives that challenge dominant representations of German identity. At the same time, the medium’s distinctive intimacy, produced through conversational speech and headphone listening, facilitates forms of engagement that are both affective and political. By centering sound, voice, and listening, this thesis contributes to Afro-German studies and media studies, arguing that podcasts actively participate in the ongoing construction of identity.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Sound of Belonging in Afro-German Podcasting……………………………...1
Chapter 1: Genealogies of Afro-German Activism and Community Formation……………...…10
Chapter 2: Sonic Intimacy and Black Coming Out in TUPODCAST ………………..……...….26
Chapter 3: Identity and Self-Reflection in Afrikanah………………..…………………..........…51
Conclusion: Sonic Citizenship in the Present……………………………………………………70
About this Honors Thesis
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