Diaspora Diaries Podcast

Before we discuss the Diaspora Diaries Podcast, we should define our terms. A diaspora is the scattering or dispersion of a population from their original, traditional, or ancestral homeland to various, often multiple, other regions. It refers to people who live outside their native land but maintain a strong, shared identity, cultural, or emotional connection to that home.

As Diaspora Diaries Podcast creator/host Awa Sow notes: “We live in a world that is constantly made things difficult for us.”

Awa Sow continues defining her show: “Diaspora Diaries is a platform where people from across the diaspora talk about everything from racialization and belonging to identity, art, and everyday experiences. The idea really is to center voices from diaspora, and open up conversations about what ‘diaspora’ means to us, and how it shapes our realities. My background in Race and Postcolonial Studies inspired me to make academic scholarship on these topics more accessible and rooted in people’s lived realities.”

Awa started the podcast in 2025 and just launched season two in collaboration with Transmission Roundhouse.

Awa explains: “The Transmission Roundhouse podcast platform was the perfect partner as they support exciting, underrepresented audio makers to bring their ideas to life, based in London’s iconic Roundhouse venue. The scheme has produced various award-winning podcasts and partnered with organizations like Spotify, Glastonbury, and the BBC.”

Here is a summary of the first two episodes:

EP1: Spoken Word and the Politics of Awareness

Awa speaks with spoken word artist Tariq Brown about using poetry to make power visible. They explore how he transforms complex, often academic ideas — from capitalism to systemic oppression — into poetic, thought-provoking verse. It’s a conversation about heritage, awareness, and the poet’s role in illuminating systems of oppression.

EP2: Rethinking Borders: Race and the Politics of Belonging

Awa sits down with scholar Luke de Noronha to question what borders really do in our everyday lives. From citizenship and belonging to the politics behind “migration crises,” they explore how borders shape who belongs, who is welcomed, and who is framed as a threat.

Ear Worthy asked Awa why she started this podcast, and she answered, “Diaspora Diaries started as a way to hold space for the many — and sometimes paradoxical — ways in which race, migration, language, and place shape people’s realities in the diaspora. It was also conceived as a platform where social sciences, and particularly research on race and racialization, could be discussed in a way that is grounded in lived experience and accessible to people outside academic spaces. Rather than simply translating theory, the aim is to disclose how these ideas are lived, negotiated, resisted, and reshaped in everyday life, and how people in the diaspora engage with this knowledge beyond the university.”

Awa continues discussing the start-up pains. “Beyond the lack of technical equipment and the practical challenges that come with starting a podcast from scratch, the main difficulty lay in finding the right balance between depth and accessibility. The podcast engages with dense social science theories and research on race, migration, and racialization, while also aiming to remain engaging, relevant, and grounded in lived experience. Much of the language used in social sciences to explain social patterns and power relations rarely leaves academic spaces. The challenge was therefore to break down these concepts without diluting them — to make them accessible and meaningful without flattening their complexity or reducing them to surface-level discussions.”

Ava didn’t have previous podcasting experience, and explains: “The person I initially launched the project with, who co-produced Season one, had some familiarity with podcasting tools and platforms and helped me get started on the technical side. Beyond that, the podcast has largely developed — and continues to develop — through experimentation and learning by doing.”

One of the central messages of Diaspora Diaries is that while social markers such as race, ethnicity, religion, migratory background, gender, and sexuality shape diaspora realities, these realities are neither uniform nor static. While research on race and racialization is increasingly present in academic and public discourse, there is still limited space for exploring how this research is taken up, lived with, questioned, or transformed by people in the diaspora themselves.

Awa Sow asserts, “Diaspora Diaries steps into that gap — foregrounding difference, complexity, and contradiction rather than flattening diaspora experiences into a single narrative.”

Check out Diaspora Diaries Podcast.