The Gift of a Podcast with M.E. Luka
Amplified is an audio blog series about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. This month on Amplified, we sit down with M.E. Luka, host of the Critical Technology Podcast, to discuss techno-culture methods, making art inside the academy, and the politics of podcasting.
-
Stacey Copeland 0:02
[Theme music plays] Welcome to Amplified, an audio blog, a podcast, about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. I'm your host Stacey Copeland. Following our last three Amplified episodes featuring our amplify sustain stream cohort. In this episode, we are joined by Dr. M.E. Luka to talk about their shift from media industry into academic life. As media producers and academics. How do we navigate that murky middle that comes with theorizing and making in the academy? Throughout our conversation we'll unravel the complexities of M.E.'s journey from her role as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, to their exploration of cultural policy, creative practice, and techno culture methods. We'll delve into the origins of the critical technology podcast, its evolution within the academic landscape, and its recent affiliation with amplify. And of course, M.E. will share some behind the scenes insights into the evolving new season of critical technology, unpacking the messy realities of academic inquiry today.
M.E. Luka 1:17
My name is Mary Elizabeth, Luka, people call M.E., my initials. And my pronouns are she/they, I am an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, the podcast that I'm involved in is the critical technology podcast. So my particular research is in, I would say, sort of a combination of cultural policy, creative practice and techno culture methods. And you know, what I mean by techno culture methods kind of changes year to year, which is the joy of working in a field that is ever changing. The way that I focus my research is, I often explain it as a way to understand how an individual creative person or artist is going to make their way in the world, right? Because they're going to make they're going to travel through the world in different ways in different pathways according to what their needs for resources are. And their capacity as a creative person, which is a big field. And it crosses many disciplines. My PhD is in communications and media, which gives me a lot of scope for thinking about what are the different kinds of disciplinary areas that I work in. But I've also been trained as a visual artist. And I worked for many years as a media producer and director for television and the internet primarily, although from time to time for audio projects as well on radio or whatever, my affiliation to amplify was really kind of accidental, which I, this is one of the things that I have found over the years in my life, that it's kind of like keep your eyes open, see what doors open up in front of you and walk through them. Right. And that is definitely what happened with it with the Amplify project. So I was working as the director of a collaborative specialization on education credential at U of T. And Sara Grimes, who is the original host and founder of the critical technology podcast had founded the podcast during the pandemic, to kind of replace the in person speaker series that we have at the institute. And as she finished her term she had put in a proposal to amplify to become the critical technology podcast to become part of the network. And I think a little bit with bated breath. She said to me, as she walked out the door on her sabbatical, hey, do you think you could carry this through. And so the gift of a podcast landed in my lap at a moment when I was ready to receive it, I had, in fact, just finished two series of videos that were meant to be used in academic and educational environments. That's my natural home is video making. And both of them were really oriented towards educational understanding, the opportunity that's presented by being affiliated with amplify and carrying on the work of the critical technology podcast for this year, in particular, is the opportunity to really think about this in the context of my own research, which I've been really, really ready to do for quite a long time. And I have done in other kinds of environments, I do a lot of research creation based work. I like having that tool set available to me as a way to think about what is the dissemination purpose of my research? How do I talk about this in a way that will cross over not just many disciplines inside the academy, but also into the sector and back?
Stacey Copeland 4:41
Yeah. And so coming to this question of why podcast do your research that's really at the core of amplify. Some of our collaborators are coming to podcasting as the first piece of media that they're making in relation to their research, for instance, but as you mentioned, you have this kind of long trajectory of walking the two sides of industry and Academy of thinking about research creation. What is it about podcasting? And kind of approaching this question of why podcast your research are you mostly thinking about coming from your background as a media producer as well?
M.E. Luka 5:18
Yeah, thanks. That's a great question. In in a way for me personally, it's a great way to expand my own experience, I'm a very hands on person, I need to do something myself in some kind of way in order to understand how it functions, right. And I think this is one of the things that's really interesting about podcasting, there's a very low bar to entry, you can try it with very little access to technology, etc, you can make it a lot better if your capacity grows, or your resources grow around it. More production values, more resonance, like all the things that kind of come with, with that kind of professionalization. And you can kind of dip in and out of those elements, right? So it's one of those kind of as somebody who, who kind of trained as an experimental media maker, that is my happy place, right? Well, I'm gonna make this really crappy version over here, because it's going to say something texturally about the topic that I'm dealing with, or the people that I'm talking to. So I get really excited about those possibilities, I do want it to be legible to other people. So there's a certain level of kind of production value that I do want to have come into play, and particularly being really aware of that muddy line between the Academy and the sector, and thinking about how does knowledge move around in both of the kind of places, what is key, as in pushing the form in the art world, is that people who are really thinking about this, take it up in interesting ways. And then it sort of pushes its way into the world in a more organic, natural way. When I think about who has access to the ability to tell stories, which I think is a fundamental human activity, then podcasting is a really good way to enable the potential for telling more and more stories that are different one from the next. And that is definitely a characteristic of the culture sector, the creative industries, that kind of nuances or uniquenesses, or individualized, not, as in ego, individualized, but kind of specific pathways that people can take and what they've accomplished in their lives. It's so different one from another. And again, that kind of podcast environment allows for that to be expressed, and potentially for people to gain greater insights and understanding into each other and thereby, to think about more inclusion and perhaps, hopefully to act on it. Right. So. And I think particularly now is we live in a society that is so highly polarized that finding places where people can share what they think, in ways that potentially open up more ways of inclusion. That's a good thing. Right?
Stacey Copeland 8:16
Yeah. I mean, talking about the politics of podcasting, and thinking about those low barriers to entry that have become very ingrained in the discourses around podcasting. Where are you hoping to take these ideas and politics of podcasting as you move into the next season?
M.E. Luka 8:33
One of the things that we're trying this year that I think is a little bit different from the last couple of years, when Sarah started the podcast a few years ago, what she focused on was looking at kind of cutting edge, recently published research, and then and then trying to have a conversation with the author about what that research looked like and how, how it might go out into the world and have an impact and in a variety of different ways. And, and I think that's one great way for this to be focused. Another the way that I'm taking this particular podcast this year is to take a cross cutting, thematic approach in the sense that what I'm doing is taking the topic of methods, which is something that crosses disciplinary boundaries more easily in a lot of ways than disciplinary language, or the kind of focus of each area or even what the foundational kind of theoretical framings of those disciplinary areas of methods, how we do things and how we think about how we do things. That is something that can really crossover quite nicely. As a consequence. I have a real mix of people on the slate, who are you know, kind of range from we would call emerging artists or early researchers through to a group of collaborators, The Fourchettes, that I have worked with for the last eight or nine years in thinking about in our case a project called Dirty methods, which is an acknowledgement of how messy methods are how, you know, when we read an article, or we read an account of a particular research, Endeavor is very linear in its presentation. First, we did this, then we did that, and then we discovered this, and then we analyze that and then we and tada, we should do this next. And when you're conducting research, particularly when you're talking to people, or you're involved with communities, it is not that clear, right? kind of loop through a bunch of different sets of relations. You work with different methods to figure out what it is that people need, you question yourself, you question the folks involved in the project, all of that kind of thing. So the project or the dirty methods project is really about unpacking what that looked like for a whole series of pieces of work that we've done over the years, and our conversation for that eight year period, about how we managed to kind of hold together as a group and put together a series of resources that we've published online, primarily geared as it turns out for graduate students. And then the other episodes are really focused on, again, a range of people who are doing kind of early career, and very media driven methods, approaches through to a much later career much more established. Researchers who have been looking at the Internet for 20 or 30 years and thinking about what does this technological foundation that we're standing on for the last many decades, what is it that has worked? And when has it worked? How has it worked? How do you make those decisions, that kind of thing. So that's, that's going to be this season of that podcast.
Stacey Copeland 11:47
And, you know, you're talking through kind of the trajectory of what this next season is going to look like, I can imagine it was not such a linear process of moving from a to b of who you wanted to talk to, and how, what do you wish you had known when you first started out on developing this next season and kind of inheriting this podcast critical technology?
M.E. Luka 12:09
It's a good question. I, it's one of those kind of, like, I wish I always wish I knew everything, from the time that we were three years, I want to know everything. And I have learned over the years to gain, you know, be a little bit patient, and wait and see what reveals itself. And I don't and I don't mean that in a kind of lackadaisical way. It's very, I'm looking for things. I'm looking for trying to understand what the possibilities might be. But I have become more practiced over time at recognizing them. I mean, in terms of podcast, known how easy it was to think about what could be done with a podcast. And I mean, I sort of think about it, the way I the parallel that I've drawn, in my mind is that in the transition from analog to digital media, and kind of late 1990s, in the commercial environment, there, there was a real challenge. In the kind of introduction of editing software, where what happened was, there were so many bells and whistles that were possible that people just started playing with bells and whistles to make anything and it was there was a whole lot of crap that was produced because people didn't know how to use it. Right. And similarly with podcasts, and were like, Oh, I could do you know, like, there's so many affordances there's so many pieces, the ways in which I could conduct this. And part of what I've been doing is sort of working through with each of the participants in the podcast. How do we record your offering or your contribution to this particular podcast, and we have this amazing setup at the at the KMD Institute, where we've got microphones, and we've got recording equipment, interfaces, etc. But truthfully, most of the people that I'm going to be talking to are international. And so you know, it's like you and I, it's we're, we're recording in two different countries, so or at opposite ends of the country. And they're, you know, we just need a simple setup that can give us good audio. And this is the thing that I remember from TV from working in TV and the internet for so long the internet. When it first started, you first started being able to put content on it. Audio products were really great. Because they didn't they weren't big file sizes. You can put them up TV things way harder in the sense of how big the files were. But also and this is something I learned from working with my radio colleagues at CBC the quality of audio in TV recordings and video recordings was way worse. Not as good. Not as clear as the radio recordings which always struck me as bizarre. But so that's kind of like this is one of the things that it you know, perhaps I needed to do more research and think about what does it mean to have the opportunity to do a podcast from the point of view, what the technology is capable of, but also how flexible it is. Which of course, I knew in other environments, and when we did just come through a pandemic, where we all worked on Zoom or other video technologies. But it I hadn't quite kind of put the pieces together when I was setting up and programming the episodes for this year.
Stacey Copeland 15:31
Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the main things that comes up for me every time I talk to researchers who are making podcasts, regardless of whether they've made media before is that every time you come to a new form, it's kind of this unlearning process to get to that point, again, that you're like No, I know, I know what to do with this, I have a story to tell. And here are the tools that this particular forum can offer. So I'm very much looking forward to seeing how your season turns out and listening to it. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat a bit.
Thank you for listening to the sustain stream feature series on amplified. I'm your host, Stacey Copeland, and our project assistant and editor is Natalie Dusek. If you have comments or additional thoughts on our conversation today, or on any of Amplify's initiatives, please do reach out as special thanks to M.E. for joining us on Amplified this month. Make sure to follow us on Twitter aka X Instagram or subscribe to our email newsletter on the website for updates and to keep in touch. Thanks for listening to Amplified, a podcast, an audio blog about the sounds of scholarship coming to you from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. [Theme music plays]
-
Dr. MaryElizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is Assistant Professor, Arts & Media Management at University of Toronto, where she examines modes and meanings of co-creative production, distribution and dissemination in the digital age for the arts, media and civic sectors. Dr. Luka is a founding member of the Critical Digital Methods Institute at University of Toronto Scarborough, of research-creation group Narratives in Space + Time Society, and of the technoculture research group, the Fourchettes.
-
Intro + Outro Theme Music: Pxl Cray – Blue Dot Studios (2016)
Written by Stacey Copeland & produced by Natalie Dusek