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055 - AAA2017 - Collins and Gamwell
140 Plays7 years ago
Paper: Crowdsourcing the Conversation: On the Future of Podcasting, Public Engagement, and Exercising the Anthropological Tool Kit, Collins and Gamwell
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcasts and Anthropology
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You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
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This is the recording of a paper presented at the 116th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington 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 Anushin Setagasamy and Kyle Olson, both of the University of Pennsylvania.
Presenting the Future of Podcasting and Anthropology
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This paper was presented by Ryan Collins and Adam Gamwell of Brandeis University and was titled Crowdsourcing the Conversation on the Future of Podcasting, Public Engagement, and Exercising the Anthropological Toolkit. We're going to begin our presentation today. It's called Crowdsourcing the Conversation on the Future of Podcasting, Public Engagement, and Exercising the Anthropological Toolkit.
Growth and Engagement of 'This Anthro Life'
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All right. In all retrospective likelihood,
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What could have been a brief foray into podcasting has transformed from inspiration into something that seems to be veering onto a movement, which continues to grow with the backing of ever more voices. After four years, it's compelling to us that the podcast This Anthro Life is still here. Not only because we're the ones who've kept it going, but because we found that there is some real life, some vitality we've come to see in the expression of anthropological thinking
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and doing. There's a hunger and emphatic head nodding when you hear an idea that resonates to your bones, even if you don't know exactly why. The question for us, though, isn't why did we start, but how is our professional experiment still going? Quite simply, our experiences have showed us
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that the conversations we share matter. Our listeners tell us this matters, that there's always been this deep something about being human which compels us to belong, to share stories, to build together across social difference wherever and however that is found. Anthropology matters and the conversation carries on.
Anthropology as a Conversational Practice
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Today we'd like to explore some of the past, present, and future perspectives of the This Anthro Life project through three different themes. Anthropology is a conversation
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the contemporary need for generalists, and why we see podcasting as a means for public engagement, but not an end in and of itself. Ultimately, we align our future outlook with the charge led by AAA president Elise Waterston in the 2016 public archeology panel, or anthropology panel rather, sorry about that, that anthropology has much to say, but it struggles to get out beyond its boundaries. We can do better. We need to coordinate a collaborative message to reach wider audiences.
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So, you know, we were speaking last night reflecting on AAA anthropology and where we want to go. And what we've come to find is that what really matters to us is we've seen it echoed in sentiments from colleagues, from listeners, from fans, that anthropology just gets done, that people do it. Sure, there is some frustration out there over what public anthropology is, what it should be, what it shouldn't be. And there's frustration over how and who the audience's of anthropology are, right? And there's questions about the need to offer as deep of professional development
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as we do with theory as students. Now, we need to talk about TAL as a professional experiment. Now, today we feel a bit different. Now it's something that verges on an experimental profession.
Multimodal Shifts in Anthropology Practice
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That is, we've been part of and watched podcasting as a medium and format take off in popularity and power across the world. But the experimental part to us has to do with the fact that our work with TAL has come to matter because of change. And that change we're referring to is of these recent multimodal shifts in practicing anthropology.
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Now our emphasis here is actually not on anthropology, but on the changing of practice. Let's start with a few numbers. So one year ago today, TAIL was a predominant anthropological podcast that boasted to us, we thought was great, 2,000 subscribers. Now for anthropological podcasts, let alone a self-funded graduate student project, that wasn't bad. Now in the fall of 2016, we decided to make a few changes to our format. For one,
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We picked up on trends and podcasting about the emerging golden timeframe for episodes. This is to do with community times. And we realized that as a result, 25 minutes is about an average listing session that people will hang on for. And so we cut our episodes from 45 minutes to 25. Around this time, we also started talking to the AAA about forming a network of anthropological podcasts.
Audience Expansion and AAA Network Support
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Now, fast forward to today. We have over 36,000 subscribers. We've had to increase our website traffic bandwidth three times in six months.
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And our episodes have been downloaded over 90,000 times. Similarly, we get about 92,000 site hits every month. Our aim is to promote anthropological thinking to the public through enjoyable and entertaining conversations. We've been making podcast episodes as TAL for five years and produced nearly 100 episodes between 25 and 45 minute time frames. Our format is unscripted. It's a roundtable conversation supported by weekly research, though we're prone to experiment.
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Many of our episodes involve interviews with expert specialists, book reviews, critical analysis, and more. Because this anthro-life is structured as an open-ended conversation, we have two formats in addition to our general conversation pieces. The lucid freethinks that work as a kind of backstage pass to our minds where we talk about ourselves and making a podcast in general. And we also have the short but actionable design and applied mini-sodes. The aim with these is to provide actionable steps and insights that our listeners can apply to their everyday lives.
Partnerships and Outreach in Anthropology
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We've secured official collaborations of this point in partnerships with the American Ethological Association. Thanks, guys. As well as the Society for Applied Anthropology, Sapiens, part of the Winter Grimm Foundation, and the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry, EPIC. That being said, we continue to be surprised by the demographics of our listeners, especially those who reach out to us through tweets and email that are also rediscovering or perhaps rekindling their passions for anthropology.
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long after completing their degrees and working in non-academic industries. Our partnerships reflect our own drive for outreach and anthropological doing. And some examples from the past year are collaborations with formerly savage minds blog Anthrodendum. With them, we created a four-part miniseries in order to engage why anthropology matters today. And with that, we were able to engage the American Anthropological Association
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members of sapiens, the Society for American Archaeology, and as well as Anthrodenum as well. So bringing those four groups together, we're able to focus on the different perspectives and modalities that each of them operates on and why they think anthropology matters from different perspectives.
Promoting Accessible Anthropological Thinking
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One of the main goals of this Anthro life is to demonstrate and practice anthropological thinking in a publicly accessible way with no homework, no jargon, and no extra reading. Can't argue with that, right?
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So podcasting provides a natural medium in our view through which to do this because open conversations don't easily allow for footnotes, extensive quoting, or hard to say sentences. It sounds simple, but as many academic anthropologists know, trying to explain Bourdieu's habitus or Marx's labor theory of value in conversation without confusing your students is a difficult skill.
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However, this anthropolife is intended to explain anthropological theory, and it's really not intended to highlight anthropologists in their work. Rather, we're using podcasting to break down anthropological research into easily digestible formats that promote holistic thinking. In other words, what matters to us is having a conversation. In relation, we see this anthropolife as somewhere between academia, design anthropology, public anthropology,
Podcasting as Democratic and Alternative Radio
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and entertainment. Since podcasting is not
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yet really a fully accepted academic format like a peer review journal or a thesis, it sort of hovers on the fringes of the academy. In its roots, podcasting is a form of alternative democratic radio production. For many, in the entertainment news, informally learned something new camp. This is couched between what we saw as new forms and an opportunity to raise public consciousness about anthropology. Back in 2013,
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Podcasts were still a relatively new medium, especially for anthropology. In the applied anthropological communities, like the National Association of Practicing Anthropology, or NAPA, and Epic, they hadn't really gained traction yet in the anthropological worlds, and we're really glad to see that's changing. Podcasting is perhaps a great medium for sharing knowledge that follows on the heels of classic radio, and moves forward with more audio book consumption by the general public, and the need to stop privileging the visual for information consumption. Recognizing that many people struggle with reading,
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This last point is particularly important to us. You know, one of the things that we find inspirational that actually came from our first design and applied mini-sode, which again, art itself is sort of an experiment providing bite-sized content about five minutes with one or two actionable steps you can take for your everyday lives. You know, where ethnography happens. So one of our inspirations came from our friend and guest and corporate anthropologist, Andy Simon. And she told us, neuroscience and just plain being human reveals that our brains hate change. They just don't like it.
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You know, but that's part of life as we understand it. But change is this pivot upon which we adapt or evolve. And if we don't, as a basic component of evolution, we perish. So to help our lowly lizard brains deal with the complexity of an infinite chasm of change before us, Andy suggested that rather than going with the default thought or speech pattern, no, but when confronted with a new idea, switch it and just say yes and.
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And this simple two-word transformation isn't simply a verbal switch, but it's a switchboard upon which we can train our perception, that anxious breath that we say when I say, I'm not sure I can, into I can, and I'm not sure what comes next. And sometimes that's enough. So in 2016, the AAAs at the annual meeting in Minneapolis last year, we were struck by Alex Golub, who is one of the main people that began Anthrodendum, his remarks on anthropology's need for generalists in a good way.
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Now he spoke, and this is for the Winter Grand 75th Anniversary Panel, and he said simply that we need to speak against the idea of having over-specialization of our research and our work in terms that he believes each of us really should be able to pull out any Anth 101 phrase or idea at any point. And whenever we talk to other publics in different groups, simply anything you get from Anth 101, you can pull out the public and you can open some ideas. Similarly, we were really drawn inspiration from Laura Nader on the need again for generalists, and so she says that we never
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can forget, we cannot forget the idea that American anthropologists are American or for Pakistani or Pakistani. You're influenced by the culture you grew up in, right? No matter how objective we try to be, we must never forget the fact that we see with our own eyes. And that's what's happening with too much specialization. The field has, or the one field that needs generalist is the one that studies the human condition. Now these two ideas are guiding principles not only with this anthro-life but also our lives as anthropologists. Podcasting has given us a medium
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and a means through which to be generalists, to have to learn to speak a lot across a number of registers, a number of fields of inquiry, and tones of conversation. It's fun, but it's deep work, especially because our show is unscripted. Now, for us, making podcasts is kind of the opposite of having a research specialization or a particular knowledge expertise. It is rather an invitation to speak and to speak well about multiple things. The joy comes from seeing the connections that we make across conversations.
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With the recent surge in visibility that this anthropolife has seen, we now have the ability to engage with broader publics in meaningful ways, like curating a series of episodes on diversity and inclusion in the academy and beyond. Here, our inspiration comes from anthropologist Ruth Benedict's claim that anthropology's job is to make the world safe for human difference. In a world where inequalities, power differentials, and endemic privilege continue to impact the fabric of university communities, we aim to address concerns surrounding
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the LGBTQ equality on campuses, cross-cultural diversity, religious pluralism, and race and ethnicity in the contemporary U.S. head on using 21st century social technologies to reach the widest audiences possible.
Crowdfunding and the New Role of Anthropologists
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But we're also trying to make TAL sustainable at this point. In this way we recognize that the public can also mean public funding. Recently we started a crowdfunding campaign through a platform called Patreon where people can give small amounts of money each month
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which on the one hand helps us work towards our goals of sustainability. On the other hand, this campaign helps us engage with our audiences in a fuller capacity. This isn't a pitch, I swear. So much of this recognition is that podcasting is a legitimate media source that people are effectively and actively engaged in. Patreon helps us as a means for this coming to age in anthropology in the podcast sphere
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We think about this in four different ways, or three different ways, rather. One, given podcasting's massive popularity amongst multiple audiences, there's ample room for social science and anthropology-focused media. Two, there appears, at least to us, that there's a growing hunger for anthropology to provide actionable insight into our contemporary world, and not just to reflect it. And finally, three, the rise of crowdfunding is a way to directly support artists and makers.
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What this tells us is it's time to see some anthropologists as makers rather than just scholars. That is, there is an alternative modality to conducting research, producing critical commentaries, results and analyses, and distributing them in new public ways. Podcasting is what we do as makers, and making needs to be sustainable. It's like many public-facing anthropologists. For us, jargon is a point of contention. We mention it a lot, right?
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But jargon or avoiding it actually isn't really the point. It kind of doesn't matter. Now, when we say this, what we mean is that, sure, kinship or ontology are some kind of higher level specialized vocabulary, but let's be real, all disciplines have jargon. And most of them don't worry about it. If we podcast, if we engage in what we can call multimodal research, which on the one level is just another way of saying not writing purely academic ethnography, and if and when we have podcasted as this anthro life,
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What we see is that people have this hunger to be reminded of the same awe that we felt when we first learned about that crazy discipline that somehow studies everything human. They want to know that anthropology matters, and it does. Ethnography matters in all of its forms. And podcasting does give a different mean, a multimodality, for real. A structured cacophony of sounds that engages our senses just a little bit differently.
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Anthropology, in its most useful form, can be framed as a way of working through problems. In this statement, we're not alluding to human exceptionalism, but we are recognizing, as Esther Bothrup contested, Malthus' claim that competition would inevitably give way to the dissolution of culture, resulting from increasing conflict over dwindling resources, leading to what Thomas Hobbes characterizes as nasty, brutish short lives. We're not saying that.
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We're saying that culture will always help us work through the most pressing issues of the human condition. We agree with Bothrup that the concerns of natural selection were broken because of cultural ingenuity. Culture as a process and a tool has routinely enabled us to circumvent our
Anthropology's Role in Problem-Solving and Adaptability
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limitations, whether natural or selective. Problem solving is at the heart of what it means to be human. And our capacity for symbolic logic is not just what makes us human, but it's to define and to solve problems.
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Culture has served as much as a change in enabler as it has as a limitation at times, and this we're all aware of, unless, of course, one isn't an anthropologist or an academic. So this, we'd say, is one of our largest reflections of what we try to share through podcasting and our current incarnation. This anthropolife isn't multimodal research.
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It's a multimodal delivery service. What we care about here is use. We believe anthropology is useful when it does, when it makes, when it produces, and especially when it shares. Thank you.