Who are you?

Hi, we’re Rosie and Asha, both 2nd year HSPS students at Clare, and we are the co-presidents of The Feminist Files podcast!

What is The Feminist Files?

Asha: Gender Agenda is a feminist collective across Cambridge for the entirety of the University: anyone from any college can join it! Within Gender Agenda, there are a lot of different subcommittees that do a lot of different things, such as campaigns and political activism, and one of the central ones is creating a magazine every year with feminist-focused work based on a theme. The Feminist Files is specifically a kind of multimedia campaign, comprising a podcast and a Substack, that tries to bring feminism online so that everybody can access it.

How did you get involved with the podcast and how can others do the same?

Asha: The podcast was started last year by Astrid Healey Carrasco and Helena Kondak, who have since graduated, and we’ve taken over now. We saw the advertisement on Instagram that applications to run the podcast were open, and Rosie and I both love listening to podcasts – we listen to podcasts all the time, like in our kitchen, because we lived together last year and this year. It’s such a good way to kind of consume knowledge and think about and consume perspectives on different topics, and we thought it would be a really cool idea to get involved in something we were passionate about.

What niche does The Feminist Files fill compared to other similar podcasts out there?

Rosie: I would also say that the benefit of having that information memorialised on the internet is that you can access it over and over again. And it can be accessed not just by Cambridge students, but also by people outside of Cambridge.

“The benefit of having that information memorialized on the internet is that you can access it over and over again”

Have you ever had a guest on the podcast that really impressed you?

Asha: The first podcast episode we did over the summer was with one of my old teachers – Alice Elwell – who is a PhD candidate in Australia. She talked a lot about feminism in the classroom, feminist educators and how feminism exists in and pervades all aspects of life, especially among students and can be used as a really important tool for information and learning in secondary school and high school classrooms. She said something like, “Feminism is to be haunted by what refuses to go away,” and I thought that was a really powerful phrase. She also mentioned how discomfort is often viewed as disorder: just because you’re uncomfortable with an idea, it’s often perceived as disorder, but that prevents us from having challenging conversations and meaningful conversations.

“I’d really like to interview Katherine Ryan, the comedian, because I think she’s quite an outright feminist and she’s got these really strong views”

Who would be your dream guest for the podcast?

Rosie: Oooh! I’ve actually been thinking about that a lot. I’d really like to interview Katherine Ryan, the comedian, because I think she’s quite an outright feminist and she’s got these really strong views. She doesn’t shy away from feminist topics, but she’s also been so successful in her field, which is standup and TV comedy, which is so male-focused and sometimes very hostile towards especially confident women and women who make jokes about sexuality and difficult subjects like that. It would be really interesting to interview her, but I can only cross my fingers and hope.

What would success look like for the podcast?

Asha: This is something we talked about in our recent episode, but helping people interrogate why we hold the beliefs that we do and being able to understand your “because” is something that I think if more people did, we’d have a deeper understanding of the world and could hold more meaningful discussions about it, as opposed to hitting an ideological standstill because no one’s willing to listen.

The Feminist Files is streaming on Spotify now.