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057 - AAA2017 - Sacco
80 Plays6 years ago
Paper: The Past, Present & Future of AnthroPod, Sacco
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Podcasts and Anthropology'
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:07
Speaker
This is the recording of a paper presented at the 116th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington
Session Organization and Paper Presentation
00:00:14
Speaker
D.C. on December 1st, 2017. The session was entitled, Podcasts and Anthropology, Exploring Approaches to Multimodal Research and Communications, and was organized and chaired by Nushen Sedeghasami and Kyle Olson, both of the University of Pennsylvania. This paper was presented by Catherine Seiko of the University of California, Irvine, and was titled, The Past, Present, and Future of Anthropod.
Podcasting's Contribution to Anthropology
00:00:40
Speaker
Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for being here so early in the morning, and thank you to our panel organizers. What a great set of central... How's that? Good? Okay, great. I also just want to quickly thank Mike. I'm one of the co-coordinators for the podcast, Anthropod, which Arielle also spoke about and worked on.
00:01:03
Speaker
So I want to thank my fellow co-coordinator, Marios Folaris, for that podcast and all the other anthropod members whose insights and work really inform this talk today. So what I want to focus on is a question that Nushin actually just brought up of what does podcasting offer anthropology? This is the starting point for my talk and what I hope to do is discuss some of the complexities that arise
00:01:31
Speaker
in trying to figure out an answer to this question, right? Which seems pretty simple, but what I'm hoping to dig into this morning is some of the opportunities and challenges that arise in the actual practice of anthropology podcasting. So I'll be talking primarily about my experience with anthropod because it's sort of what I know best, but I'm hoping that this will also shed some light on anthropology podcasting at large.
Birth of Anthropod in 2013
00:02:01
Speaker
So to begin, what's anthropod? Maybe some of you have heard an episode before. Maybe you haven't. Officially, it is the podcast for the Society for Cultural Anthropology. What that means in practice is that we're a somewhat ragtag group of graduate students and early career scholars who are fiddling around with audio production and interested in kind of exploring what podcasts have to offer
00:02:30
Speaker
to anthropology. We have a team of about a dozen graduate students and early career scholars spread out across the country. We work together to produce episodes on a monthly basis. The podcast is run through cultural anthropology's contributing editors program. A lot of journals, I think, are beginning to have programs like this. Basically, it's an opportunity for
00:02:54
Speaker
early career scholars like us to produce supplemental journal content online, including this podcast. So I think of Anthropod as kind of a real time effort in asking and answering this question of what does podcasting offer anthropology?
00:03:12
Speaker
And what I mean by this is that we're really kind of playing around and figuring it out as we go along. I'm going to call this kind of early iteration of Anthropod, Anthropod 1.0.
00:03:25
Speaker
Anthropod was started in 2013 by a group of contributing editors at Cultural Anthropology. They had been working on building web content for the journal, and this content was things along the lines of author interviews, teaching tie-ins for particular articles, things like that.
00:03:46
Speaker
It kind of makes sense that in this early iteration of Anthropod, the focus was really on kind of an extension of this existing web content. So a lot of author interviews with scholars who had published articles in cultural anthropology. There were also some early episodes that aimed to go kind of behind the scenes of the journal, asking questions about
00:04:12
Speaker
you know, open access academic publishing, which was something that cultural anthropology was turning towards at the time, how to publish a journal article, things like that.
Evolution of Anthropod Format
00:04:21
Speaker
So in this original model, what podcasting offered for us was in a way to share these in-depth, kind of behind the scenes conversations about current anthropological work and journal publishing. Realistically, this was primarily for an academic audience, as you can kind of
00:04:41
Speaker
surmise for my description. I will talk more about public Anthro as we go along. But this kind of iteration of AnthroPod was really great in producing content that helped build a following for the podcast. Some of our back episodes, they remain popular, have up to 9,000 plays. Some of the
00:05:07
Speaker
Like, yeah, so on the higher end around 9,000 average closer to five or six, which is to say that people were interested in this content, right? It was a model that drew some interest, right? Beginning on these early foundations in 2016,
00:05:30
Speaker
we began to see some changes. So, um, Anthropod began to shift towards a more dynamic format that would allow us to kind of explore the affordances of podcasting in greater depth. Um, and that's what I'm going to focus on in the rest of this talk. So the question of what kind of podcast Anthropod was, is, is becoming, um, is situated in this broader question of what kinds of podcasts are possible.
00:05:57
Speaker
And here I draw on my colleague Adam Ganwall's kind of typology of different kinds of podcasts. So he describes four different podcasts, the scripted story, the open conversation, the serial audio drama, and expert interviews. And if you listen to podcasts, you can probably kind of think off the top of your head of a podcast or two that fits into each of these categories.
00:06:21
Speaker
And so Adam, in this piece that he wrote, categorizes anthropod in the fourth category of expert interviews, which at the time he was writing in 2006 really was an accurate description of our catalog of episodes. So much of anthropod's back catalog, as I described, is expert interviews, a smattering of recorded conference presentations, that kind of thing.
00:06:50
Speaker
But in 2016, as our former coordinator, Rupa Pillai, was leading Anthropod through a re-envisioning of what the podcast could be, we realized there were some areas in which this trajectory wasn't quite working for us, or wasn't perhaps pushing what we could do as far as it could go. And around this time was also, I think, really a moment of explosion for podcasting in general, so this is when
00:07:19
Speaker
things like this American Life's Serial podcast and Paris Invisibilia really gaining momentum. So I think there was a sense that it was becoming apparent that podcasting could support greater innovation in audio storytelling. And we were interested in thinking about what does this mean for anthropology? So we wanted to be a part of exploring the particular affordances of podcasting for anthropology.
00:07:48
Speaker
And again, this existing format was perhaps not taking full advantage of what could be done through podcasts.
Diverse Storytelling in Anthropod
00:07:55
Speaker
The other piece of this is that from the start, Anthropod had aimed to be a vehicle for public anthropology, right? And we perhaps weren't quite meeting those goals.
00:08:06
Speaker
So I'll come back again to the degree in which we have or have not been successful, but it did seem like opening up our format might lead to a renewed commitment or efforts at drawing in broader public audiences. So, Anthropod was sort of reborn as Anthropod 2.0. And if you're interested in reading more about this, there's a post on the cultural anthropology website by Rupa.
00:08:33
Speaker
But basically what this meant was two major shifts for anthropod. So the first was developing an explicit commitment to exploring different formats for crafting episodes with richer sound. So what this means is that our members are interested in experimenting with sound design
00:08:55
Speaker
both within Anthropod's existing interview format and exploring other formats. So within the format of interview style, we recently had a three-part series on outer space that drew on NASA's sound archives, so mixing in some really cool
00:09:15
Speaker
space station and shuttle sounds with anthropologists who do work on outer space. We're also looking to move beyond the interview format to make episodes that are more narratively interesting or weave together. The drones episode that Ariel talked about is a great example of weaving together
00:09:34
Speaker
different interview styles. We also had a recent episode on Pokemon Go that featured interviews with Pokemon Go players in downtown Detroit, as well as interviews with academics who were doing related work. So this is an early example of what might be a more ethnographic podcast. This is still very much a work in progress. We're very much in the experimentation stage.
00:10:04
Speaker
it will be interesting to see sort of where this goes within our team. The second big shift that we made with AnthroPod 2.0 was to open up our format to guest producers. And what this means is that basically anyone around the world can pitch an episode to us. You don't have to have any previous podcasting or audio production experience. There's sort of like a proposal process in our team. That's the proposal to make sure it's anthropologically rigorous and things like that.
00:10:34
Speaker
But then we will support you in producing an episode. And we've had three episodes produced by guest producers so far, including that Pokemon Go episode and more in the works. So it's been a really cool way to draw in more people into the kind of anthropology podcasting world.
00:10:56
Speaker
And so through these two shifts, we really hope to explore how the podcast format might be a medium for telling anthropological stories differently than other existing venues, things like journals or even ethnographic films. So I want to kind of introduce this model of thinking of our
00:11:16
Speaker
the podcast as a platform. And in these recent changes, one way of sort of understanding what this means for Andropod and perhaps as a model for other podcasting efforts is that we have shifted more towards functioning as a platform for audio storytelling.
00:11:34
Speaker
and anthropology then as sort of a singularly visioned media. So what do I mean by this? We host a platform for diverse experiments and audio storytelling, audio storytelling and anthropology for anthropologists across the world, right?
00:11:56
Speaker
So insofar as we serve as a platform, we do have certain guidelines for what we look for in episodes. But we are really quite flexible in the details of how each producer executes on and shapes their episode. And this also means that we're sort of presenting a diversity of perspectives on what anthropology is and why it matters, pulling from people working across the globe. And not just graduate students or
00:12:26
Speaker
anthropologists that are in academia. We also have pitches from even undergrads. Really, I guess they're very excited about podcasting. So kind of like the right demographic and other people who are maybe trained in anthropology but not currently in academia. So there is a downside to this model, which is the loss of continuity between episodes.
Collaboration and Innovation in Podcasting
00:12:51
Speaker
So you don't necessarily know when you download an anthropod episode
00:12:56
Speaker
how similar or different it's going to be to the last anthropod episode that you listen to. But what we hope this model might do as sort of a flip side, a way in which this might be an advantage is to pull in new listeners who might be interested just in a particular episode or a particular kind of episode. So in order for anthropod to function successfully as a platform,
00:13:22
Speaker
The key here is collaboration, right? So that's kind of fundamental to the nature of our work as a podcast. So we have this committee of about 12 members. We collectively decide everything from which episode proposals to approve to how to shape kind of the big picture strategy for the podcast.
00:13:44
Speaker
And these kind of recent, more explorative formats have really come from the ground up, from conversations amongst our committee members and guest producers. And from our perspective, one of the most promising affordances of podcasting is actually this opportunity to work collaboratively, which is not necessarily something that is often available in academia.
00:14:11
Speaker
So I do want to touch briefly on anthropotist public anthropology.
00:14:17
Speaker
As much as we hope that this might sort of come true, in a critical evaluation, anthropot is still largely a disciplinary endeavor, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that we sort of continue to reckon with.
Balancing Challenges in Podcasting
00:14:35
Speaker
And one way that we've sort of pushed down this path in a slightly different way is to explore the pedagogical potential for podcasts. We have this series called Anthropites,
00:14:46
Speaker
that provides short explainers on key anthropological concepts. So before I wrap up, I want to make a quick note on audio production, which we find to be one of the biggest challenges with producing anthropology podcasts. As I mentioned, we're really trying to balance this
00:15:07
Speaker
commitment to accessibility with improving audio production, right? And so many of our members have little to no audio experience. So how do you sort of boost the quality of recording while remaining accessible?
00:15:24
Speaker
is a challenge that we contend with. Another piece of this is the monetary limits of being a not-for-profit podcast in the anthropology world where the funding is not falling from the sky. This brings me towards the end of my talk, which is the future of anthropology podcasts.
Growth of Anthropology Podcasts
00:15:48
Speaker
As I kind of alluded to just now, there have been fairly few resources or incentives within the field of anthropology to date to develop these kinds of podcasting skills, both technical and narrative required to produce podcasts. I think this is really beginning to change. This panel is a great example of this sort of burgeoning anthropological podcasting networks.
00:16:13
Speaker
And so I sort of wanna put forth the hope that as the world of anthropology podcasting grows more robust, I hope that we might find better ways to collectively support each other in developing podcasting as a really robust corner of the world of anthropology.
Influence of Anthropology on Public Discourse
00:16:31
Speaker
And finally, I just wanna offer a brief coda, which is to sort of flip this question and ask, what can anthropology offer podcasting?
00:16:40
Speaker
which also maybe gets at the dynamic between anthropology and journalism that Ariel was talking about.
00:16:47
Speaker
So there's this 2016 piece in the New Inquiry by David Banks, where he critiques the really meager representation of social scientists in podcasts like Radiolab and Invisibilia, who talk about a lot of topics that anthropologists have insight on, but tend to turn to more quantitative, positivist social scientists or scholars when trying to provide an academic perspective on these topics.
00:17:17
Speaker
And I think a really great point that he makes in that piece is that the importance of this, or the stakes of this lack of representation of social scientists in more popular podcasts is that the question of which disciplines contribute to sort of public knowledge is a political question, right?
00:17:44
Speaker
I wanna sort of propose that disciplinary podcasts like AnthroPod, like this AnthroLife, like Anthropological Airwaves, may be able to contribute to these conversations that are happening on more popular podcasts in a more direct way than sort of the kind of anthropological discussions that you might find in a journal article.
00:18:09
Speaker
or a seminar. So my final provocation is to ask how we might build stronger bridges between popular and academic podcasts to share what anthropology can offer with broader audiences. Thanks.
00:18:24
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.