Sustainin' Conversation Episode 3: Who's Listening?
Amplified is an audio blog series about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. This month, we'll be sharing a series of three episodes we're calling Sustainin' Conversation from a round-table conversation we had with members of our first Sustain stream: Sally Chivers (Wrinkle Radio), Charisse L'Pree (Critical and Curious), M.E. Luke (Critical Technology Podcast) and Megan Goodwin (Keeping it 101: A Killjoy's Guide to Religion). In this third and final episode, “Who's Listening?”, we speak with the podcasters about their audiences, the role of considering an audience, and the importance of collaborative scholarship.
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Hannah McGregor 0:00
Hannah, hello and welcome to a special three part series of the amplified audio blog that we're calling sustaining conversation. I'm Hannah McGregor, the co director of the Amplify Podcast Network and Associate Professor and Director of Publishing at Simon Fraser University. For this mini series, we gathered the hosts of the amplify podcast network's first cohort of sustain podcasters to answer three questions about scholarly podcasting. In this third and final episode, we're talking about audiences, but first a quick roll call.
Sally Chivers 0:38
I am Sally Chivers. I'm a professor at Trent University. My podcast is called Wrinkle Radio.
Charisse L'Pree 0:44
Hello. I am Charisse L'Pree, and I am the host of Critical and Curious with Robert Thompson coming from Syracuse University at the Newhouse School.
MaryElizabeth Luca 0:59
So my name is Mary Elizabeth Luka. I'm at the University of Toronto, and I am the director at the Knowledge Media Design Institute, where we have a podcast that is called The Critical Technology podcast.
Megan Goodwin 1:14
Hi, hello. I am Megan Goodwin. I am the co host and Co producer of Keeping it 101 a killjoys introduction to religion podcast where we dare to ask the question, do you have to care about religion, even if you are not yourselves religious? Spoilers, the answer is yes.
Hannah McGregor 1:30
You'll also hear from my co director here at the amplify Podcast Network, Stacey Copeland,
Stacey Copeland 1:35
Hi, I'm Stacey Copeland.
Hannah McGregor 1:38
In the last episode, we heard the sustained podcasters talk about how scholarly podcasting helps them build relationships with students and colleagues, engage a wider public, and rethink how we measure scholarly impact. Now onto our third question. I am curious, when you first started making your podcasts, who your intended audience was, and whether the audience that you're thinking about has changed over time. Who do you imagine you're speaking to when you podcast, and what if anything, do you know about your listenership?
Mary Elizabeth Luka 2:13
I have a I have a bunch of thoughts about this, and it arises partly from having worked in the media industry for many years, and that and kind of understanding that audience is important to the degree that it's important, right? It's kind of like the reason that money gets put into things is often because there are potential audiences attached. I'm not even going to talk about the all the problems with the media sector, but the but the thing that I think is really useful for me is that one of the key ideas that that I've developed in my research to reference myself boldly, is the idea about narrow cast audiences, right? And thinking about…I don't. It's not possible to think about the public or all the audiences or everybody in the world that you want to talk to. It's really about, how do I focus my energy so that I speak to the people who are going to find me, whether I promote myself or not? Right? And narrow cast audience, the idea of narrow cast audience is very different from broadcast audience. Narrow cast audience allows for dialog in a way that broadcast audience doesn't, and I think that's very compatible with the with the podcast, kind of space, how do we develop and encourage sets of dialogs with different groups of people, and how do we represent that on the air in a way that makes sense to the folks that we're trying to have conversations with? Right? So that's number one. So then the corollary about it becomes kind of like, oh, okay, so I can identify audiences right away. When The Critical Technology podcast started, Sarah was really targeting it towards other scholars. This was something for people and that to in partly with that sense of, I want a peer reviewed podcast that's going to become part of my publication list. And so scholars, first, students, second, everybody else after that, whoever everybody else is, I from an ecosystem kind of point of view, I start earlier in the cycle. So the first people I want to talk to are the people who are going to give me money for doing this stuff. I want to pitch a podcast, whatever the resource is, right? And that's not just the kind of grant application piece of it, but sitting on the juries that make the decisions to fund this kind of thing. And again, you know, to Charisse's very, almost very first point, that if we can shift the system part of this, then it's going to become easier for everybody to do the thing. So my first audience is, I need other people to believe that this is a valid kind of work, and so I will participate in advocacy and education on that front. And then, and hopefully they'll listen to. Some podcasts as well. And then, yeah, students, scholars, thinking about participants in the research, how this is serving them. So Sally, to your point about kind of like, who is it that needs to hear this that has already said it in other ways, or is can participate in that dialog. So, yeah, that's it has. I would say my approach to this has not changed over time. It has deepened that I am more convinced than ever that we have to be very specific about who we're talking to in any kind of production publication, right? Yeah.
Hannah McGregor 5:41
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. Narrow casting is really something I'm teaching a publishing and social change course right now that I teach every every year, it's like my undergrad seminar, and I every year I'm just trying to convince students that their job is not to speak to everybody, that they are really convinced that their job is to try to reach everyone. And I'm like, if you reach one person that is world changing, it's not. It really, truly is quality not quantity.
Sally Chivers 6:13
My initial imagined audience was age based, and it was a group of people who don't think aging applies to them yet, but it does so. I was imagining, you know, midlife, you know, people who are all of a sudden like, Oh, crap, am I going to have menopause? Like, I thought that was just something for someone else. I think my dog is agreeing in the background and and really trying to draw people into a conversation about aging that I know needs to happen. I also wanted to just get people who were already talking about aging on my feeds, talking to the smart age studies, people that I knew. What I found is that my audience, age wise, is much broader than I thought. I've had undergrad students approach me and tell me that they've listened to my podcast without me telling them to I suspect some good colleagues of having had an influence on that. But I've also had people in their 80s and 90s listen to it, right? And my mother say, like I ran into so and so at the co-op there in Calgary, and the Co Op is like the grocery store there, and she's listened to your podcast, right? And so that feels like it's complicates the part of your question of, who do you imagine to you're speaking to when you podcast? Right? Because I can't quite narrow it down with so each episode, there's different segments that I'm imagining a different audience, but generally speaking, it's like people who realize they are going to grow old if they're not old already, right? That's maybe how I how I would capture it.
Mary Elizabeth Luka 8:00
I would also think this that that those undergraduate students are interested on, not only on their own account, but of because, because of the conditions that they live in, whether that's with parents or that, or with grandparents, where, I mean, I think that's one of the things that's so interesting about your podcast, is it is an all ages podcast, right? In that way of, how do we, um, how do we address these, both medical but just also social, living concerns, right? So I so it's very on the ground, everybody has to do this. I kind of like have a brother who works in grocery and a sister in law who works in the bank, and boy, they have jobs forever, right? Like it's everybody needs to eat, and apparently we need money in this capitalist system. So, yeah.
Hannah McGregor 8:44
Yeah. I mean that. Like, what was it this, this meme going around when the the Sex and the City reboot came out, that the characters in Sex and the City the reboot are older than the characters in Golden Girls were and like, how, how totally has our thinking about aging transformed in just a handful of decades?
Sally Chivers 9:07
And one of the things that really surprised me when I did an interview for the student newspaper and I said, Well, what topic should I do? And she wanted me to do a topic on like, Botox and fillers that 20 somethings are using, which at my age group like I hadn't realized was happening, and now I'm looking around at everyone. I'm like, oh yeah, fascinating, right? And so that obviously I'll need to do an episode on wrinkles. At some point.
Charisse L'Pree 9:35
I came across like, so Kylie Jenner has been dragged for looking way older than 26 and so there's a comment about how we're watching in real time, this is a tweet, watching in real time how fillers affect your face, like because she's been using fillers since she was 16, right? And then convincing all of us that she had full lips and we should buy her gloss. I'm not cool with that. I just think, you know, it's a really interesting perspective, not necessarily within your podcast, but possibly a corollary of what aging means. Again, again, among these younger folks like you, know that they're prematurely aging while simultaneously desperate for, like, a skincare routine. And I don't know, as somebody who looks younger than my 45 years, it's just always really fascinating to hear, like, the way other people understand aging, and also the way we don't understand & I'm excited to hear your stuff on intersectionality. We don't understand how women of color age at all, at all. Our complete understanding is white women, and so therefore you have a tweet like, goes viral every time when, like, Taraji P Henson is pushing 60, and they're like, oh, like, Yeah, she looks like my auntie. What's the problem?
Hannah McGregor 10:56
Really great demonstration of how much Sally's podcast is for everyone, because now we're all just like, can we just talk about aging? But no, Charisse, talk about your audience. I
Charisse L'Pree 11:07
I don't know who my audience is. I'm not gonna lie. My audience is me and Bob and so come back to your n of one. You know, I tell my students, if you try to talk to everyone, you won't talk to anyone, given the polarized environment we're in. So like, just decide there's also, I have quite a bit of work on, like, Black creators and the role of embracing their Blackness, and how that's actually more applicable to more people than trying to go for this generic thing. Like, suddenly we can understand one person's unique experience, even if that person doesn't check the same boxes that we do, because we are brought into their authenticity, as opposed to, like, desperately trying to get everything for everyone. So ultimately, with Critical and Curious, it was very much me and Bob, and we're like, we don't even listen to podcasts. We're like, this is the podcast we would listen to, right? Because we're talking for our students. We're like, we're going to make a class. Because we don't have the means to make a class. We couldn't get on the schedule, whatever we're going to make a class. So the design was always, anybody who wants to take a class on Fast and Furious , Keanu Reeves or Romeo and Juliet remakes. Here's the class materials, and that. That was it. We didn't even try. I keep yelling at him for not amping up our podcast and all of his interviews, I'm like, you need to talk more about our podcast and get people to do this. Having said that, I just started a new podcast, and I apologize if this is not the time or place, but I just started a new podcast with a dude from philosophy, so I've got this whole body of work on diversity and satire. And so he does the philosophy of racial humor specifically. And so we were like, oh, we'd listen to a podcast. We're going to do it on SNL Saturday Night Live. And our original format was very much the same as Bob. We sit down, we talk about each episode, but then we're like, man, this is a taking up too long. We're not writing a book about SNL every episode, this is too much, so then I thought about it. So now our new podcast is called SNL 101, a podcast for educators who want to use SNL sketches in the classroom. And the whole thing is like every week after SNL on Monday, we talk about the three sketches that we would use in the classroom, and here's the readings we would provide, and here's the key terms that we would use it for, and only talking to. And it resonates with people who are not professors. But I would also say that when you know your audience, or when you are your audience, it's just so much more joyful than trying to dance for a judge who you don't know and you can't relate to. So in that one, the whole thing emerged because we have who we wanted with the audience, which is people like us who are like, Oh, can we turn around an SNL sketch ASAP and use it in the classroom. And that's how that one's evolved. Bob and I are still going with our long form, you know, talk about it, have a class, have a lecture series on a given set of films, but thinking more about the audience in my next podcast endeavor has has helped me hone it, and now our production is much tighter [snaps]. We do it 30 minutes. I can turn it around in an hour production, spit it out, and it's out, and all of a sudden I feel like, Wow, is this what it's like to be timely, because I have, I am academic in my soul. It takes me, it takes me three years to publish a paper, right? And so it's funny because, like, students be like, I have an interview that's due tomorrow, and I'm like, that sounds like a you problem. Now, I see the value of timely content, but that's only possible because I'm making stuff for me,
Hannah McGregor 11:35
[Laughs] it's also so you know, particularly for those of us trained in humanities disciplines, we're trained to fetishize the solo scholar, the solo publication, working in isolation. And the way that podcasting brings this possibility for conversation and collaboration and and collective knowledge creation to the forefront, that we can stop pretending that we're just having ideas by ourselves somewhere in a booklined study, but we're actually like talking things through with other people whose brains we enjoy, and like figuring stuff out in the moment and challenging each other and pushing each other, and that that really, I think, shifts the whole model of how knowledge is made.
Megan Goodwin 15:51
So I have the official Keeping it 101 answer, and then the true for me answer, which I only actually realized listening to y'all. So the official Keeping it 101 answer was that we had assumed our audience was going to be like five people who already like us and also teach religion. We had imagined ourselves making a couple episodes of the lectures that we give every single semester no matter what the class is. So like, what is religion and why do you care in four different flavors, right? Except that we launched in January of 2020, and I don't know if you all remember this, but suddenly, a couple months later, people were very desperate for materials that worked in remote instruction contexts. So we got very popular in a way that we had never anticipated, very quickly, which was great. And we also learned that there is a real hunger, both in the US and abroad, to know more things about religion. I'm the Americanist on the team, so I spend a lot of time thinking about how Americans get disincentivized away from talking about thinking about taking religion seriously, like and what happens when you're told you don't have to give a shit about religion. What happens is you have a super majority Catholic Supreme Court, and all of the policies that come along with that you have Trump winning because we did not take seriously the momentum of evangelicals. We thought they were a joke. And just because they're ridiculous doesn't mean they're not also dangerous and evil, and this is a lot of what we're trying to do with the show. So it turns out that our audience is not just five people who also teach the same classes we teach. It is a lot of folks who teach nothing that we teach. It is folks on every continent except Antarctica, to the best of my knowledge, and only because Buzzsprout doesn't track Antarctica, I think we have been weirdly popular, not weirdly it makes a lot of sense. It just never occurred to us. But the religious education folks in the UK love us, because they actually do do the academic scholarship of religion in primary schools, right? So we got questions about, like, how do we design curricula around this? Like, we don't know, because we don't know your systems. Oh, but thank you for asking. That's awesome. But we also learned that our audience is, social workers and folks that work in healthcare and a couple screenwriters. It turns out, people are really curious and want to know more about this, and so being able to bring more and more people into that conversation, and particularly being able to demonstrate why this conversation matters so much, and how much religion is shaping the world around us. Again, even if you yourself are not personally religious has been really important. Also, just have to say, because I can't not say it. Thinking religion is only important, if it's only important to you, is such a fucking Protestant take on religion. Stop letting Christians colonize your brain. The End, for the official answer, on behalf of keeping it 101 for I'm like me personally. Again, I am bad about thinking about audience because I am autistic and I forget about other people all the time. So if I am not in conversation with you, I kind of forget you're there. And it's not that I don't like you or care about you, it just my brain can't hold on to things for very long. So the real answer actually, who is my audience. It's Ilyse. It's 100% Ilyse. Ilyse is the only person I am thinking about when I am letting nonsense come out of my mouth. And to be honest, I think that's amazing. Like, Ilyse is my one of my absolute closest friends. She is family, but she is also my most generative and most treasured thought partner, and the way that this medium lets us again bring our entire selves, our entire brains, into these thought projects, has been amazing. It is equally important to both of us that the jokes work as we're getting the fact right. And frankly, the jokes working is how you get people to care about the facts right. You need to startle them. You need to unsettle them. You need to bring, I think, a sense of irreverence, even as you're emphasizing how grave and how immediate the risk of not taking religion seriously is. So that whole package is really important, and I do my best thinking with Ilyse like I think more deeply and more expansively, certainly more globally, because she's pushed me to do that, and because she is such an attentive audience in and of herself, she makes me realize things in my own work that I wouldn't see otherwise. So the reason that we're still doing this four years later is because I think we just really enjoy each other, and we think better together, and I love that for us, and like what a what a joy, what a privilege, what a blessing to have someone be so careful and so kind as to take all of my nonsense seriously.
Hannah McGregor 21:10
Yeah, another sort of through line that I've that I've heard in all of your responses, that feels so like exciting for me as somebody who you know, as M.E. was saying, has seen a real shift in the last decade in terms of of how we think about this kind of publicly engaged, non traditional research is hearing the way that people are saying, like, I can advocate for this being serious research, and I don't have to distort it into the shape of what things already look like in the academy to do so that I can insist that my work is going to sound different and take a different shape and privilege different interlocutors and different modes of engagement, and that at the same time, I am going to fight for this work, and that for me, is where the real transformation of these systems starts is not when we sort of reshape ourselves into the shape it wants our knowledge to take. But when we insist that, that we're going to actually reshape the institutions themselves, as much as that feels, as Sarah Ahmed says, like smashing your whole body into a brick wall sometimes.
Megan Goodwin 22:21
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure some knowledge is made by individual scholars in book line studies, but you know what? It's fucking incomplete. It is broken, like Judith Butler says, we're undone by each other, and if we're not, we're missing something. And my work has been unmade and remade by Ilyse and by other thought partners so many times that I am a much, much, much better, smarter scholar than I would be if I were trying to do this on my own. And like, we have been so grateful for the folks who have become our community, because they're not just audience members, right? Like they're part of the conversation. So from our very first episode, we had scholars chime in and saying, like, Okay, you're making this distinction between religion and theology. And I'm not convinced by it. I don't see myself in this conversation. How can we nuance this? And special shout out, particularly to Jorge Rodriguez and Jacob Erickson, who were really driving this conversation, where they were both saying, like, I know you respect my work, your definition of theology is not respecting my work. So how do we how do we get into this? How do we think more expansively and like, they were right, we were using a 101, like intro level overview, and I stand by that. But the push for the like 201, 301, 701, take on religion is equally as important. And again, like, what a joy, what a blessing, what a privilege to be able to think out loud with such smart, generous, kind folks.
Hannah McGregor 23:47
Thank you for listening to Sustaining Conversation, a special three part series of the Amplified Audio Blog you heard from sustain podcasters, Charisse, L'Pree Megan Goodwin, Mary Elizabeth Luka and Sally Chivers and from me, Hannah McGregor. My co director at the Amplify Podcast Network is Stacey Copeland. Our project assistant and editor is Natalie Dusek. If you found this episode interesting, why don't you share it with a friend, a colleague, a student or your dean. If you want more from us, make sure to follow us on Twitter, aka X, on Instagram, or subscribe to our email newsletter on the website for updates and to keep in touch, stay tuned for more from the Amplified audio blog series where we're reimagining the sound of scholarship.
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Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay, Ph.D., examines how media affects identity, attitudes and behaviors, and how we use different media to express ourselves and connect with others. Prof. L’Pree has authored two books: “20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love” (Routledge, 2021) bridges media theory, psychology and interpersonal communication to describe how our relationships with media emulate the relationships we develop with friends and romantic partners through their ability to replicate intimacy, regularity and reciprocity. “Diversity and Satire: Laughing at Processes of Marginalization” (Wiley, 2023) is the first textbook to explore diversity by demonstrating how satirical content can advance the discussion and change attitudes.
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.
Dr. Megan Goodwin is a scholar of gender, race, sexuality, politics, and American religions. She is the author of Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers 2020). Her next book is tentatively entitled Cults Incorporated: The Business of Bad Religion. She is the founder and co-director of the Bardo Institute for Religion and Public Policy, and the media and tech consultant on the Crossroads Project.
Dr. Sally Chivers is Full Professor of Gender & Social Justice and English at Trent University, where she is a Founding Executive Member and Past Director of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society and recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Research Award. A prolific and sought-after speaker and collaborator, Dr. Chivers writes, speaks, and makes short films about the social and cultural politics of health, aging, and disability. Her monthly podcast Wrinkle Radio fights ageism one story at a time. She has published two books that draw on film and literary analysis to emphasize connections between aging and disability in the public imagination. Her two co-edited collections show that cultural representations influence how we think about aging, long-term care, and disability, and vice versa.
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Links and Resources:
Keeping it 101: A Killjoy’s Guide to Religion
Intro + Outro Theme Music: Pxl Cray – Blue Dot Studios (2016)
Written by Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGregor and Natalie Dusek & produced by Natalie Dusek