Two primary theoretical frameworks ground Diamond's dissertation — and, by extension, the methodology described in this guide. Understanding them deeply will help you ask better questions, offer better feedback, and recognize when the episodes are doing what they should theoretically do.
Django Paris and H. Samy Alim's Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (2017) was developed in response to earlier frameworks — multicultural education, culturally relevant pedagogy — that were well-intentioned but ultimately still oriented toward helping students from marginalized communities succeed in dominant academic culture.
CSP shifts the question. Rather than asking "how do we help students bridge to academic culture?", it asks "why is academic culture the destination in the first place, and what are we losing when we treat students' cultures as something to be leveraged rather than sustained?"
In practice, CSP means: Instructional design that doesn't just tolerate students' cultural practices but actually centers them. Curricula that treat the knowledge communities of color have generated — through music, oral tradition, craft, food, spiritual practice, and creative expression — as worth knowing, preserving, and building on.
In Diamond's dissertation: Every design decision Diamond made reflects CSP. She recruited participants through networks of trust. She held orientations that treated participants as partners. She brought them into a space — a professional podcast studio — that honored the medium they already knew and respected. She let the conversation go where it needed to go, including into theology and humor and frustration and joy, because all of that is data.
The "secret sauce" that Diamond's research identifies — the quality of belonging, affirmation, and cultural fluency that Black and Brown creatives experience in certain spaces — is CSP in action. Her dissertation doesn't just describe it. It enacts it.
Key source: Paris, D., & Alim, H.S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. Teachers College Press.
Critical Media Literacy, as developed by Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share (2007), insists that media is not neutral. Every media object — every television show, every advertisement, every podcast — was made by someone, for someone, with assumptions embedded in its form, its content, and its choices about whose stories get told and whose don't.
CML teaches people to ask those questions. Who made this? Who benefits from it? Whose perspective is centered, and whose is absent? What would this look like if the people it's about were the ones making it?
In practice, CML means: Not just consuming media critically, but producing media intentionally. Using the act of creation as a form of resistance, representation, and community-building.
In Diamond's dissertation: Diamond's research questions are CML questions. She is asking how podcasting can help Black and Brown creatives amplify their voices and present counter-narratives to the dominant stories higher education tells about who belongs, who succeeds, and who has something worth saying.
The focus group conversation in her episodes demonstrates CML in action. Theo, Vanessa, and Melissa Nicole are not just sharing their experiences — they are analyzing the structures that shaped those experiences, naming the power dynamics, and imagining alternatives. They are doing the critical work that CML describes as its goal.
Key source: Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2007). Critical media literacy, democracy, and the reconstruction of education. In D. Macedo & S.R. Steinberg (Eds.), Media Literacy: A Reader. Peter Lang.
Understanding CSP and CML is not just an intellectual exercise. It shapes how you advise.
When you're reviewing episodes through a CSP lens, you're asking: Does this episode sustain the participants' cultural practices, or does it translate them into academic language? Do the participants' voices sound like themselves, or have they been edited into something more "professional"? Is the humor, the spirituality, the vernacular left in — because it is data?
When you're reviewing episodes through a CML lens, you're asking: Are the episodes doing critical work, not just descriptive work? Are they naming structures, not just experiences? Are participants positioned as analysts and not just informants?
These are the questions that make podcast dissertation advising different from traditional dissertation advising. You're not just asking whether the argument is sound. You're asking whether the form is doing the theoretical work it claims to do.