Thinking Bodies with Kristin Rodier
Amplified is an audio blog series about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. This month on Amplified, Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor are joined by Kristin Rodier, one half of the feminist philosophy podcast Thinking Bodies. In this conversation, we discuss the unique affordances of sound-based scholarship for, as Kristin so beautifully puts it, “surfacing the inarticulable” through the embodied meaning of pauses, tone, and conversation.
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Hannah McGregor 0:01
Welcome to Amplified, an audio blog and podcast about the sounds of scholarship from the Amplify Podcast Network. I'm your host, Hannah McGregor, and in this episode, we're continuing our series of conversations with the new cohort of Sustain podcasters. Our guest this episode is Kristin Rodier. Along with Anna Mudde, Kristin is the host of Thinking Bodies, a feminist philosophy podcast. Kristin is an Associate Professor of philosophy at Athabasca University, where her work explores a critical phenomenology of the body that intersects fatness, gender, ability and race. In this episode, Kristin talks to us about why podcasting felt like exactly the right medium for conversational feminist philosophy that's interested in paying attention to embodiment. She also unpacks some intriguing complexities around how we categorize the work of scholarly podcasting, especially in light of varying copyright practices around pedagogical materials at our institutions. I know, I know, copyright and pedagogy don't make the conversation sound extremely exciting, but I assure you, we do quite a bit of laughing. So let's get started with Thinking Bodies.
Kristin Rodier 1:34
I'm Kristin Rodier, she/her. I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Athabasca University. I work on interdisciplinary feminist philosophy, really interested in thinking about the body, which brought me to this podcasting adventure I'm on with my colleague, Anna Mudde at the University of Regina, who specializes in feminist philosophy as well, thinking a lot about craft. She's a big knitter, so we talk a lot about making things. And our podcast is Thinking Bodies. And we do we do a few things. We solicit clips from other feminist philosophers to talk about ideas they're interested in. We sort of put them together around a theme or an article, and we talk about them, we share anecdotes, we question each other, and then we, you know, laugh a lot and talk about feminist philosophy. Yeah.
Hannah McGregor 2:33
I love that. I, so much of what drew us to your podcast when we listened to it was that sense of the sort of bringing embodiment into the work, right, the laughter, the presence of affect, the sense of sort of proximity between you and your co host, whether or not you're actually in the same space, that sense of the way that sort of conversation creates some of the knowledge that is happening, and the opportunity to hear that knowledge being co created together, which is always so pleasurable for me. I'm curious why podcasting is the medium that you were drawn to, to, you know, create this, this public feminist philosophy project? You know, it could have been a variety of other mediums. So why a podcast?
Kristin Rodier 3:24
A few reasons. I think, you know, I would consider myself early, mid career, and so there's often this sense of, Well, what got you interested? What do you love about this discipline? What do you love about ideas? And I think Anna and I would both agree that one of the things we really loved about it was co creating in conversation, just sort of following ideas, dialoguing and having those moments where all of a sudden a concept is silly, or you, someone can poke a hole in what you just said that you were convinced of, and then you go, Oh, you're right. That is, you know, and having those moments, and, you know, enjoying them with someone who's a generous listener, not a, you know, sort of poking that hole to knock down your your thoughts, but, but to kind of move it along and and work together. That's, that's the relationality piece that I really loved in philosophy. So podcasting seemed like a way to-- I mean, it works, because the vibe with Anna is so good. But to find someone that I really want to talk to about these specific topics, you know, I have not done a deep dive on a feminist philosophy of trust, and I, I've always wanted to do that and, and, and finding someone who would do that with me and record that and have some laughs and and also take the topic seriously. That is an amazing experience for me. And then the hope is that the way we can put that conversation together is something someone else would get that same vibe from from listening. So that someone who also wants to hear two feminist philosophers or three, however many we have on, work with an idea and follow it in weird directions and then bring it back. And so, so we're really thinking about podcasting as opening a space for us. Anna talks about philosophy of craft as-- one of the ways that craft is interesting is that it's got this embodied knowledge that allows the inarticulable to surface through what our bodies know to do, and we're exploring sound as a way of surfacing that inarticulable. So when I put this pause in between [pause] Anna's thought and mine [pause] there's something there between us [pause] in that and and there's something in that laugh and that emphasis. So there's, there's a way that podcasting allows us to be philosophers differently than when we're writing.
Hannah McGregor 5:59
Yeah, I love "surfacing the inarticulable." Wrote that down. Good.
Stacey Copeland 6:04
Beautiful. Yeah. It was like, please, tell me more. But I love that. I think that really speaks to what podcasting can offer in the academic space that we're trying to get at with the network. And we've talked, of course, the three of us Amplify School in the past, about as well is the value of conversation, the value of hearing voices in conversation to help us better understand the world and better understand ourselves and our bodies. And in those pauses, in those moments of connection, who do you imagine you're speaking to with the podcast? You know, you and Anna are in conversation. You have guests record. But who are you imagining as the listener? And what if anything do you know about the listenership so far?
Kristin Rodier 6:52
Good question. The imagined listener that I have is... I had a cohort of students once that I taught many, many, many years ago. It was my first time teaching, and I was teaching a feminist philosophy class, and I had these students that were just so great, and they almost kind of took the course and ran with it, and I was along for the ride. And it was just one of those really special cohorts. And I know, I've followed all of them, they're off in their jobs, and they're doing great things in the world. And I think to myself, I bring sort of one of them into the room imaginatively and go, you know, they've taken feminist philosophy a little bit. They get my humor, so they're a generous listener, but they want to know more, and they want to keep learning feminist philosophy. They dig ideas. They're interested in what kinds of concepts we're thinking about, and they want to listen to some feminist philosophers have a conversation that's not sort of too high level. And that's, that's who I bring in imaginatively. We haven't had a lot of feedback, like on Apple podcasts or something like that. I've had a lot of feedback on social media or LinkedIn or whatever, and we get a lot of feedback on people loving our vibe, just our connection. People have also said that they they appreciate the accessibility, like the level of engagement with ideas being not too high level or too jargony. So that's been good, but we'd love more.
Hannah McGregor 8:30
Yeah, I often think of the audience for these kinds of scholarly podcasts as being, you know, our students who are out there in the world that, like so many people, are getting these like humanities or social sciences undergraduate degrees and spending four years of their lives, you know, four to six years of their lives, deeply immersed in thinking about these ideas and having conversations with people. And then they go out into the world, and we're like, well, no more for you.
Kristin Rodier 9:01
Yeah.
Hannah McGregor 9:01
You are dead to us now because you're not paying us tuition anymore. Like, why would we assume that all of the students that we teach go out into the world and immediately lose all interest in all of the ideas that they were engaging with? Like, you know, I was kind of surprised when I first started podcasting to find that there was this existing audience already out there, very explicitly saying, like, Oh, I missed this. I missed the opportunity to talk about books like this, or to talk about ideas like this. So, yeah, you know, there is, for me, this inherent tie into teaching, this inherently sort of continuing the pedagogical relationship. And I'm curious how you have been so far thinking about the relationship between your podcasting and your your teaching or your research, you know, like, how do you frame this work in your mind, and how is it feeding back into your teaching or research?
Kristin Rodier 10:00
Yeah. So, so one thing that just immediately comes to mind is that, you know, we've done the first season, sort of these four articles, and we had a fifth bonus episode, but the four articles that are feminist philosophy, they're taught on the regular, let's say one of them even more so than the other ones, and that seems to have a higher listenership, that one episode. So I think of the student who's, you know, on the train on the way to school going, Oh my God, I didn't read my Iris Marion Young, and looking up what they can find and listening to that episode. I mean, at least that's my biggest guess as to why that episode is way higher than than the other ones.
Hannah McGregor 10:25
Though, people might also just be assigning it.
Kristin Rodier 10:43
That's it. Yes, yes, yes.
Hannah McGregor 10:49
Not just the student being like, where do I find this, but also people being like, what do I give my students to help them engage with this article that they probably aren't gonna read.
Kristin Rodier 10:58
Oh! I never thought of that.
Hannah McGregor 10:59
Like, I'll assign them the article. But like, can I also give them something that will, like, engage them and model to them how we can dig into it and be a supplementary reading or course material? Yeah, like other people teaching philosophy might be using your podcast.
Kristin Rodier 11:14
That's good to think about. [laughter] I was just thinking of myself as a student, panicking, looking up resources anyway. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, we have crafted the podcast as having a very strong commitment to a kind of open pedagogy. So like, let's say that you're a total beginner in feminist philosophy, you come upon our podcast and you want to know more. What have we provided so that you can kind of think of it as like, teach yourself through the podcast? So we we provide transcripts, which... editing philosophy transcripts are actually quite a bit of work, getting all the, you know, the the jargon, together. And then we provide notes with lots of resources. We also provide a kind of overview concept map. I'm a very visual mapping type of a person. So I tend to draw a big picture of the ideas that we go through, and maybe that's helpful to a small group of people. And so, you know, we have that that aspect to it. But I also think that that there are moments, and there are relational moments when we're making the podcast that I think contribute in a way to my research and to Anna's research, where we're we're not just talking about the article anymore. We're not just trying to dig in and figure out what the article says, but we're doing something with it, and we're making connections with each other's thoughts, with each other's work, and relating it back to... you know, we're not going, "well in my previous article, I also talked about"... No, we're no, we're just kind of going, "this makes me think about this, but there's a tension there" and just sort of doing. And I see that as contributing to the kind of research I'm creating and putting out in the world as well.
Stacey Copeland 13:03
And there's something really wonderful -- I've heard this echoed with some of our other cohort members as well, and Hannah, you've said this about your own work at times -- is that flux and flow between podcasting, academic podcasting as a teaching tool and a teaching resource, but also a way of generating new research and new ideas through being in conversation with different thinkers, different ideas, and how that kind of conversation can really be a generative way of creating new research for yourself, as well as your community or research community around you. But talking about that imagined listener and like the literal panicky student that you're envisioning of your podcast, I would love to hear more about how your podcast is being received by your institution and among your peers as well. We can envision that student, but how is it being received at your institution and and is it being counted as part of the research work that you do? What does that mean in terms of your every day of workload and funding and your day to day job?
Kristin Rodier 14:14
Well, that's interesting because we are given certain kinds of ticky boxes to put our outputs in. Some of them, you know, depending on the venue, is very much about, "I've done research, and now I'm disseminating it," which is different than, you know, "I'm creating research." My approach has been to put the podcast in every, every ticky box. Just, it is all the things. The only place where there can be tension is about if I w ere creating a podcast that was explicitly and only for teaching, then it would fit into a different work category. So if I had to choose between those--
Hannah McGregor 15:00
Like a, like an open educational resource thing?
Kristin Rodier 15:03
Yeah, and, and then that there's, there's issues around, because I work at a distance institution. You know, we serve students, and we have to be able to serve them even when we're on leave or away. And so our courses are actually part of a central distribution thing. So there's some copyright issues around what I produce in the teaching part of my job. And so this I think of as teachable and bonus teaching.
Hannah McGregor 15:32
That doesn't belong to the institution.
Kristin Rodier 15:33
Yes. It's primarily about research, communication, about open access, I guess you could say to to feminist philosophy ideas, and then also, you know, I think it's been received quite well. You know, there's, there's a way in which publishing a peer reviewed journal article is not very visible at the institutional level, but a podcast has more visibility because it directly engages media. So there's, there's some pluses and minuses, but for me, I'm, I much rather the engagement that comes with the podcast.
Hannah McGregor 16:12
Yeah, God that's so interesting about the copyright issues. I had not, I had not thought of that before, but it's an interesting dimension in how you sort of frame this work, if your institution basically has copyright over teaching materials that you create. All right. So, last question. We want to know, sort of what is next for Thinking Bodies? So you know, what is your next season going to be about? Or what are you hoping your next season will achieve? What are your goals in terms of audience or impact or pedagogy? What's coming up for you?
Kristin Rodier 16:50
Well, I'm really looking forward to Anna being back local. She's been on a lovely adventure, on sabbatical, and all over Europe and and so we do have a lot of plans. We went to a conference in April and brought our microphones with us and did a whole bunch of interviews. We have so much tape from that conference, and we're thinking about how to put things together in ways that keep our vibe, because we don't really have an interview based podcast, but we did these interviews, so we're kind of doing this series of episodes from this conference. So I'm excited about that. And then we have planned a full season of episodes that are like season one. So we have those articles selected. If people step forward and they're guest producing, we'll get rid of one of those once we plan, because having someone guest produce takes a lot of work off of our plate and hopefully provides a little taste of scholarly podcasting when people come in and collaborate with us. So we're going to just keep producing episodes. I think one of the things that we're going to challenge ourselves with in the next little bit, is trying to have more of a social media presence, and figuring out what that is going to mean for us. So...
Hannah McGregor 18:10
So hard to do when all social media is broken, [laughter] but we're all we're all in it together, trying to figure it out.
Kristin Rodier 18:16
Yeah, trying to get some level of engagement, because we've already had really good engagement, just not even advertising and and putting anything out. So I think we have room to grow.
Hannah McGregor 18:27
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for for taking the time to talk to us more about Thinking Bodies.
Kristin Rodier 18:34
Thank you.
Hannah McGregor 18:38
Thanks for listening to Amplified, an audio blog and podcast from the Amplify Podcast Network. This conversation with Kristin Rodier is the fourth in our Sustain cohort interview series. You can find the rest of those episodes at amplifypodcastnetwork.ca, and you can find links to Thinking Bodies and more about the Sustain stream in the show notes. Tune in next month for the next installment in this series. We'll catch you then!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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thinking bodies is a feminist philosophy podcast for newcomers and lifelong learners of feminist philosophy. Drs Anna Mudde and Kristin Rodier crowd source voice clips from feminist philosophers (broadly construed) and use them to bring concepts to life. They are doing philosophy conversations differently, one episode at a time.
Kristin Rodier is a recently tenured and promoted Associate Professor of Philosophy at Athabasca University, located in Amiskwaciwâskahikan / ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ, land belonging to the Plains Cree, Woodland Cree, Beaver Cree, Ojibwe, and the Métis people. Her current writing explores a critical phenomenology of the body that intersects fatness, gender, ability, and race.
Anne Mudde is Associate Professor of philosophy at Campion College at the University of Regina, Canada, in the homelands and ancestral territories of the Métis Nation/les Michif, the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Nakota, Lakota, and Dakota peoples. Her newest projects are focused on technē as craft, and consider marginalized knowledges and metaphysical practices as they are expressed through human engagements with objects, bodies, and technologies... like knitting!
Also mentioned in this episode is the work of Corinne Lajoie, a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at Western University and an affiliated researcher with the Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice and Agency at Université du Québec à Montréal. Their work explores themes of accessibility and trust and they guest produced an episode of thinking bodies on the philosophy of trust.
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Intro + Outro Theme Music: Pxl Cray – Blue Dot Studios (2016)
Written and produced by: Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor
