This week’s guest blogger, Dr Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, writes about the experience of podcasting her research and about the podcasting format itself. This is an invaluable resource for those considering alternative methods of sharing their research.

Sometimes, the most practical thing you can do for your research is to go for a wander.

I believe it is almost always beneficial to regularly step sideways from our research and follow an interest that gives us joy down a rabbit hole; reconnecting with joy is not a luxury. Most of us embark on an academic research journey bright eyed and bushy tailed, fully committed, if not to our topic, then at least to the quest for knowledge. Then the road wears us down. The higher education industry loves to capitalise on pernicious and pervasive platitudes (“Find work you love and you’ll never work a day in your life!”) to convince us that we are sacrificing our wellbeing and material stability for a greater good. If you cannot live in this delusion, I am here to tell you: you are not alone. There comes a time when reconnecting to the “why” and the “for whom” of our research, the practice we dedicate so much of our life to, becomes a necessity if we want to keep going. This is the story of my deprogramming. It involves podcasting and actively engaging in re-creational practices as a part of research.

The need for community

I have been a podcast listener for years. As a child, my best friend had serious dyslexia and would listen to audiobooks, taking them out on tapes from the library and then CDs that could be played in the car. Eventually, we graduated to using streaming services like Audible, so learning as well as entertainment in audio forms was pretty normal for me.

As my career in academia progressed and I was in the throes of my PhD research, I turned more and more to the community and the intimacy of podcasts. Towards the end of my PhD, I was burnt out and in crisis. I felt that I craved a community of scholars I could belong to.

For many of us, where we do our PhDs is dictated by material considerations, like a particular supervisor, program, or the availability of funding, but it is not given that we will find our scholarly community in our geographical location. And the PhD program may be a hoop the academy wants us to jump through, a disciplining project to gain acceptance to the guild. But I refuse to cynically ignore the fact that a lot of us who went through it, who are going through it, do so also because we love to learn, we love to teach, we love to be part of an ongoing stream that has always been part of us.

So, although I had to teach myself a lot of technical skills and had to embrace the fact that my first output would not be perfect, it was worth it for me to step into the world of podcast producing.

I’ll admit that I only thought of podcasting as a method after the fact, because my initial efforts were so directly a response to my need for community, I started Philosophy Casting Call to give myself a framework and an excuse to actually reach out to other marginalised philosophers. Instead of lying in my bed, dreaming about talking to people whose work I admire, I decided to just do it. I found email addresses on university websites, or more often than not, I cold-contacted people on Twitter. The result has been, so far, three seasons of engaging and, to me at least, life-giving conversations with people around the globe, representing different paths to philosophy, including people not doing Philosophy at all, but willing to engage in philosophising.

Coming into my scholarship

On a very personal level, producing Philosophy Casting Call has been a way to dig in deeper and to discover what kind of scholar I’m willing to be, and part of that is because I allowed myself to play with different roles. The third season was produced while I was employed in an interdisciplinary centre as a bioethicist. And since then, I’ve been dreaming of creating a season four solely interviewing Filipino philosophers about Filipino texts. I also took the plunge into a docu-style narrative fiction podcast with Massively Disabled, where I was explicitly challenging epistemic authority as part of my storytelling process.

Academia requires that we have a nice, coherent narrative that is legible to our chosen disciplines. However, the reality is that many of us, through a combination of interest and necessity, will end up jumping from department to department, from postdoc to postdoc, from fixed term contract to fellowship, in a way that defies even interdisciplinarity.

And while I’m not saying you should give up on trying to be legible, I propose podcasting as recreational scholarship, podcasting as a place where you can play with what Nguyen calls “agential fluidity” (2020), a concrete example of Shalk’s “undisciplined” approach to using methods as tools to get the job done (2022).

Podcasting takes many forms, and it addresses a myriad of audiences. Having to decide who your audience is is in itself a valuable reflective exercise, and then deciding what you want to put in, insofar as technical knowledge, insofar as reaching out to guests, or managing your own promotion, is also something that requires introspection and possibly challenges you to reach out for assistance and support.

The idea of putting yourself out there on the internet is scary. Even people like me who relish the performance aspect have to think twice about how your competence will be read. Having an informal conversation captured, especially between people who are not used to press junkets or PR strategies, can be terrifying, and I absolutely do not want to downplay the variability of risk different podcast guests or hosts might face. For example, if you’re a junior faculty member or a PhD student, you may want to be very careful about what you say that might affect your employability. Likewise, if you are an established professor, you may feel the weight of representing your institution and have to carefully word yourself. And, as with all internet activity, there is a higher risk of receiving backlash and hateful comments for women, racialised, and openly queer and trans folk. But, in spite of all of this, I have found that people want to be heard. ‘Podcasting while researching’ has the wonderful ability to remove gatekeepers and to amplify the voices of those who get lost in the political game of the peer-review system. In my experience, people who are truly passionate about what they do love to have a chance to talk about it, love to have people ask them questions, love to be able to reflect and share various aspects of their research (including, but not limited to their outputs).

What we do in neoliberal academia is so structured by the need to perform individual success, but human beings are social creatures, and many of us do our best work after having engaged in thoughtful conversation with a friend or colleague.

Podcasting as method

In my own home discipline of philosophy, dialogue has been an accepted, if antiquated, form of methodology. People may be familiar with Plato’s “Dialogues” or even Descartes’ “Meditations”, and some early modern scholars will be looking at correspondence between philosophers and their friends for insights into their theories and systems. Despite this, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the conversational, almost dilettante aspect of philosophy is not as valued in our contemporary understanding of disciplinary methodology. When I first started podcasting, I was challenging this from a very affective standpoint, but now, without denying that affective reasoning, I can also see its value insofar as it captures a very real yet underreported aspect of our researching lives: the fact that our thinking evolves through conversations, whether that conversation is discussing a piece of writing with a friend or reflecting on conference themes during the coffee break in between presentations.

To claim that there is something we can learn from podcasting as method is not to say it should become the be all and end all of academic knowledge production. On the contrary, I think to do that would be to lose the recreational aspect of it, the aspect where, because we give ourselves the freedom to be possibly imprecise, or to laugh and let that be recorded, or to fumble and rephrase and let that go out onto the internet, because we give ourselves that space we can allow ourselves to reconnect to the “why” and the “for whom” of what we do.

I am of two minds about podcasting being accepted and counted as scholarship within the academe. I firmly believe it should be recognised as labour, but I am also wary that to do so would involve reproducing harmful gatekeeping practices. Regardless, I strongly believe that stepping out of our usual methods to answer our need for community, our need to challenge the limits of our disciplinary practices of competency norms, is necessary to keep the spark alive, to reinvigorate us, to stretch our limbs, metaphorically, to question why these norms and practices were put in place in the first place.

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References

Gauthier-Mamaril, Élaina. 2023. ‘Massively Disabled: A Long COVID Research Podcast’. www.massivelydisabled.com.

———. 2021. ‘Philosophy Casting Call’. Accessed 13 September 2024. https://podcasts.apple.com/vn/podcast/philosophy-casting-call/id1564647499.

Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. ‘Agency as Art’. In Games: Agency As Art, edited by C. Thi Nguyen, 0. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190052089.003.0001.

Schalk, Samantha Dawn. 2022. Black Disability Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

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