(Un)Making the Academic Podcast – Workshop for Students
Wednesday, April 27, 2022 | 09:00-12:00 | Location: SFG 2010
Abstract: This workshop is a critical and playful examination of the podcast as a form of research communication, using as a case study the podcast series of the Labyrinth Project (https://labyrinth.garden/), a collaborative inquiry into human-nature entanglements in Los Angeles and convened by Chris Kelty. The workshop will be collaborative and include listening, discussion, the reverse engineering of a podcast episode, and a prototyping design exercise. In particular, the workshop will explore the questions: What kind of a publication is the academic podcast? What can it offer for the analysis and communication of complex naturecultures? In short: what can the podcast do and what are its limits.
Christopher M. Kelty is professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has appointments in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the department of Information Studies and the Department of Anthropology. His research interests center on social theory and technology, the cultural significance of information technology; the relationship of participation, technology and the public sphere; and more recently, the role that wild animals play in contemporary urban Los Angeles. He has written two books: The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories (Chicago, 2019), and Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008) in addition to written articles on open source and free software, including its impact on education, nanotechnology, the life sciences, participation as a political concept, open access in the academy, piracy, the history of software, hackers and hacking, and many other diverse topics.
Andrew Gilbert is Senior Researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research as well as the NatureCultures Lab at the University of Bremen, and also has an appointment in the Department of Anthropology and Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto. His research explores the possibilities and politics of social transformation in contexts of historical upheaval, be it international intervention in the aftermath of war, labor struggles to protect the possibility of a secure livelihood, or citizen activism to preserve urban life-worlds from the diverse forces that would undermine them. In addition to over twenty years of research experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina (which has resulted in a number of publications in traditional formats), he brings an interest in multimodality, developed through an ongoing collaborative graphic ethnography project (https://reclaimingdita.com/), as well as other formats, including a collaborative photo essay, a collaborative multi-media panel, and podcast.