ResonanceCast is a new multimodal series from Allegra Lab that seeks to tease out timely shared concerns. After their articles have been published on Allegra Lab, we invite two authors to come together to discuss each other’s texts and the wider-ranging issues both speak to. Their conversation is moderated by someone from the Allegra Lab editorial collective, more often than not me!
Podcasts can improve access to research and offer an innovative way to assess student learning, who so said I in an article I wrote for Times Higher Education
Podcasting in academia has the potential to be radically open.
Open because it enables those unable to attend classes the chance to sample higher education remotely, because ideas explored in conversation are often expressed in more accessible language than in articles or books and because it allows students to expand their learning, giving a public voice to the type of questions that those immersed in academia might fail to ask.
And yet podcasting in academia is, for the most part, terrible…. read more here
Between 2014 and 2018 I was one of the hosts of New Books in South Asian Studies. I interviewed 48 (forty-eight!) scholars about their new books. It was brilliant, and I only started doing it for the free books.
You can listen to all the interviews I made here but you should also check out the New Books Network, because it’s a wonderful thing in the world.
Between August 2017 and June 2019 I co-hosted Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Media in India and Beyond together with Sahana Udupa.
You can also listen on the project website , subscribe by RSS
…or via Apple Podcasts
… or Spotify
The episodes were republished by EPW, with earlier ones published by HAU (!) and most were done as an official podcaster collaborator of the AAA.
I wrote about my experience of making the podcast in the article Critique of podcasting as an anthropological method and together with Sahana in the article Talking Media with ‘Online Gods’.
In 2020 I was thrilled to be part of the multi-modal anthropology experiment The Corona Diaries, published by Allegra as part of the Corona thematic thread.
The diaries, published once a day, spoke to many of the same themes and topics that those writing for Allegra at the time were also concerned with. These included the pandemic-induced changing relationship to the city and its public spaces (Stallone 2020), overwork and under-appreciated invisible labour (Cook 2020), middle-class privilege during confinement (Blanco Esmoris 2020), the need to think about public good, social justice and solidarity in political terms (Billaud 2020) and how anthropologists and social scientists more generally can reimagine our research (Kiderlin, Hjalmarson, and Ruud 2020) and prudently assert our importance in public debate (Beyer 2020).
The diaries were reimagined at the end of the year in a new format, which you can experience here: https://allegralaboratory.net/the-corona-diaries/
You: Can podcasts be used as a method in anthropology?
Me: Yes!
You: How? Why? To what ends? But what about (INSERT CONCERN HERE)? Oh, wow it might be able to (INSERT IDEA HERE)? Yay!
Me: Read this article for a thorough self-reflexive critique of an experiment I did as part of the For Digital Dignity project podcast Online Gods.
Also available here: Cook – 2020 – Critique of podcasting as an anthropological method
