Between January and May 2022, I had ten fantastic conversations with Mexico City market traders and early-career researchers from different parts of the Spanish-speaking world. From the very beginning, the idea was to explore the nature of podcasting to create an audio repository of our encounters, ideas and voices around marketplaces.

Technically, there are still many things to learn and improve; but for now, here we are, happily launching our first episode of Voces desde y para los Mercados with Óscar Hernández González. For now, the conversations are in Spanish, as we want to reach the local communities we have been working with in the Spanish-speaking world, but in future episodes we will be exploring other geographies and other languages.

It is worth saying that we embarked on this project because we wanted to be more than podcast consumers and see how it felt to be podcasters. Actually, we wanted to go beyond our usual ways of communication and test for ourselves the technological appropriation that many people say podcasting celebrates. It has been fun so far, although it does take time to plan the interviews, learn–imperfectly–how to use the software and edit the audio recordings.

As the host, I want to thank each one of my guests for their time and willingness to share their experiences as part of the ESRC-funded postdoctoral project Popular infrastructural politics: Connecting grassroots knowledge and practice on marketplace governance (read more here).

We will be releasing Episode 2 very soon.