Chris Nikkel lectures at the National Film School at IADT, teaching both visual and audio documentary. Raised in Canada, he has lived in Ireland for the last twenty years, working for fifteen of those a visual documentary maker, making mostly history programming for broadcasters such as  RTÉ, the BBC, the Smithsonian Channel and others. In addition to his visual work, his history-themed audio documentaries have won medals at the New York Festival Radio Awards and the IMRO Radio Awards. Chris is currently a student at LUCA School of Art, undertaking a practice-based PhD that focuses on audio storytelling and how it can be used to tell complex histories.

In the past decade, podcasting has become a global phenomenon—audio content production has boomed as the internet has been a source of dissemination. In the wake of this boom scholars have been defining the genre, applying labels like the ‘chumcast’, for discussion-based podcasts; or the ‘performative interview’, for podcasts centred around a key interview; and the ‘crafted narrative podcast’— the genre this paper pertains to—which adapts elements of radio documentary into a multi-episode format. The crafted narrative podcast uses documentary structure, craft editing and sound design, as well as a conversational, at times confessional, style narration that is often reflexive in nature. Openly subjective about the story, but also of the documentary process itself, this narration embraces difficult storylines, contradictions and narrative conundrums. These characteristics provide interesting opportunities for content creators dealing with complex colonial histories. This paper discusses the crafted narrative podcast as it relates to the authors current practice-based PhD project, The Commemoration, which uses a multi-episode format to tell the story of 2000 Irish migrants who left County Cork for Peterborough, Canada, in 1825—these men, women and children left lives bound by British colonial frameworks, poverty and hardship. Two-hundred years later, people in Canada and Ireland are commemorating this migration throughout 2025: staging plays, concerts and community events to mark their successful migration to Peterborough, now a city of 90,000 people. However, in the wake of Black Lives Matter—and in Canada, Idle No More—the story of the First Nations people has also become integral to the story. The 1825 Irish migrants were colonial subjects in Ireland, but colonial settlers in Canada. Into these complexities, the author proposes the crafted narrative podcast as a way of telling this full and difficult story, and in so doing avoid the divisive single narratives that can arise in more conventional history storytelling.