Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 72: Podcasting as Scholarship — with Hannah McGregor
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Hannah McGregor
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Paige Smith 0:05
Hey listeners. I'm Paige Smith with Below the Radar. A knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. This week, our host Am Johal is joined by Hannah McGregor, an Assistant Professor in SFU's publishing department and host of two amazing podcasts, The Secret Feminist Agenda, and Witch Please. They discuss Hannah's research on podcasting as a means of scholarly publishing and public knowledge sharing, and how the medium can be more fully embraced by academia through emerging peer review and library processes. We hope you enjoy.
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Am Johal 0:52
Welcome to Below the Radar. Really excited to have Hannah McGregor with us this week. Hannah is an assistant professor in publishing at SFU. Has been a prominent podcaster with the secret feminist agenda, but doing all sorts of really interesting stuff. Welcome, Hannah.
Hannah McGregor 1:07
Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.
Am Johal 1:10
You've been at SFU now for a few years, two or three years.
Hannah McGregor 1:12
Yeah, three and a half.
Am Johal 1:13
Yeah. And you were at University of Alberta. Before that.
Hannah McGregor 1:15
Yeah, I did my postdoc at U of A.
Am Johal 1:17
Yeah. So what got you into the podcasting world?
Hannah McGregor 1:20
Oh, gosh, well, it was my friend Marcel specifically. So I was already a really active podcast listener, and I was doing a postdoc in English at the U of A and Marcel who is a PhD candidate at the U of A, we were chatting one day about how doing grad school in English means you stop reading books for fun. And it's ironic because you start doing grad degrees in English because you like reading and then you're like, oh, readings, my job now, so I don't like it anymore. So we were talking about the idea of reading for pleasure. And we had this idea to reread the Harry Potter books just for fun, just like we we refer to it as a friendship project. Like, we'll read the books together, and then talk about them. And it was Marcel's idea. She had a background in community radio. And it was her idea to record the conversations as we had them and share them with people as a very low key, like, we think this will be interesting and fun. Maybe five of our friends would also like to listen. And so we started making the podcast and talking about the Harry Potter books, the way the two of us talk about books, which is a combination of a sort of familiar, friendly, fannish approach alongside the kinds of scholarly and political lenses that we bring to bear on our reading, you know, by virtue of the kind of training we have. And we were maybe five or six episodes in when a friend of ours, who was a children's literature professor told us he was assigning one of the episodes in his class and asked if we would come and speak to his class about this scholarly project we were doing. Which was the first time that it occurred to either of us that what we were doing looked at all like scholarship. Now I can look back at it and be like, oh, yeah, this is obviously two scholars engaging over a text like this counts as scholarly. But at the time, I had such a narrow idea of what counted as scholarly work, which is like serious and boring articles. So it was kind of a revelation to be like, Oh, we're making a podcast and also maybe doing our jobs?
Am Johal 3:25
Right. Yeah, it's interesting, because you know, it is this sort of decentralized form, you know, you get few $100 worth of equipment, or you don't even need that, in fact, and when I look across the university and thinking about professors, I know Roxanne pentacene in history has one around French books. Some are sort of in the communications area of departments that are more maybe on the PR side or something like that. In trying to sort out and make sense of, you know, how many there are, what people are doing in the different formats they're following and even though that wasn't your intention, you've sort of fallen into I think, a really interesting question about in what context is this scholarly contribution, there's all these fancy words like knowledge mobilization, that's like, plastered on the wall here, these these these terms land down in the academy, and then they're gone three years later, and a new term emerges. And all those kinds of things
Hannah McGregor 4:15
We're going to have a new thing to call knowledge mobilization, aren't we? It's gonna be like, like incentivization of information circulation.
[laughs]
Am Johal 4:22
The new Liberal language of the institution. Wondering how as you looked at things like peer review, and how to think through this as a scholarly contribution. I'm really fascinated by that. Just as a concept of how you've gone about it, the kinds of conversations you've had.
Hannah McGregor 4:40
Yeah, so like I said, with Witch, Please, the first podcast that I made, that was the name of the Harry Potter podcast it was called Witch, Please. With that podcast, we sort of, you know, backed our way into thinking about it as scholarly. But once we'd established ourselves as people who were kind of experimenting in this work, people started to approach me with a sort of larger interest in, you know, conversations about podcasting and scholarship. And I ended up collaborating with Siobhan McMenemy, who is the managing editor at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, who was really interested in the question of how we could make scholarly podcasts. So we embarked on this project together, where I think both of us went into it thinking like, "Okay, now we're making scholarly podcasts. So time to make something that sounds very NPR and serious because it is scholarly." And we knew that we wanted to experiment with peer reviewing the podcast, and we can talk about why that felt important to us. But we knew that that was going to be part of the project. And so we imagined that that would follow all of the traditional protocols of peer review, which is we would make an episode and then it would go out to peer reviewers, and then it would take six months, and then I would revise it and blah, blah, blah. And then a year and a half later, a podcast episode would come out. And then meanwhile, I just started making Secret Feminist Agenda for fun, because I felt like it. And then Siobhan was like, well, that's the podcast them like, that's the podcast we're doing this project on. I was like, no, no, this isn't scholarly, because I guess I never learned my lessons. Like just keep being, like, but surely this thing where I like, talk to feminists about their feminism, that's not scholarship. Alright. So people keep having to be like, yeah, no, it is, it is. And so then once we decided Secret Feminist Agenda was going to be the project. That's the point where we really started to try to figure out what does it mean, to take a podcast that is a podcast first, which means that it's sort of primary logic of production, publication, circulation is the logic of the podcast. So you have to come up with a regular release schedule and be true to that regular release schedule, you release via an RSS feed that goes out to all of the pod catchers, you engage with people on social media, you encourage people to rate and review on Apple podcasts and respond to those ratings and reviews. And so all of these sort of logics that are the publishing logics of podcasts, not the publishing logics of academia, I mean, we decided, you know, Secret Feminist Agenda was going to do all of those things. And then we would figure out how to peer review it after. We sort of stumbled backwards into that. I think that's been really vital for thinking about how you can use podcasting to engage publics outside of the university, is that you can't take stuff that's published according to the logics of the university, and try to make people engage with it, you have to actually go where people are engaging with ideas and share your ideas there. Which is the opposite logic from what I think we sometimes do in the university.
Am Johal 7:45
Now, have you with your podcasts gone back to say, like the library and figured out a way to have it uploaded or archived in such a way that it comes up in scholarly searches within the library algorithms?
Hannah McGregor 7:59
Such a good question, we have just put in a follow up grant for our initial project, in which we are partnering with the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab here at SFU to do exactly that. To try to figure out a way that we can add metadata onto podcasts so that they will become searchable and discoverable within the standard metrics of scholarly research. Yeah.
Am Johal 8:23
Amazing.
Hannah McGregor 8:23
Yeah. Yeah. So that's important, too. So I mean, you were referring to how many academics have podcasts and it's absolutely true that a ton of us do. Most of us still don't list them as our scholarship because they're not peer reviewed, they're often looked down on a lot of disciplines disdain publicly accessible knowledge mobilization, rather than valuing it. And so people do it like secretly as a side hustle, often just out of the passion of talking about their research interests to a wider audience, but they don't list it as scholarship. They don't submit it to their institutional repositories. They don't publish it anywhere that academics would be able to find it. And so while publishing a podcast as a podcast makes it more discoverable for podcast listeners, those of us who are interested in the phenomenon of the scholarly podcast, have a really hard time finding them. You basically just have to troll through Apple podcasts looking for something that looks like maybe a professor made it.
Am Johal 9:19
Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. In terms of, you know, these other pieces that come up, because scholarly contributions tend to be around the written form and all these places, is there then a kind of pressure to do transcripts and edited things and put it into that form? And does that change the podcast in some way? Because a verbal utterance is very different from what shows up on paper. And what someone might say in a conversation might be very different than they would write it down. And so that requires a second layer of processing and permissions and things like that. I'm wondering what kind of issues come up for you in that regard?
Hannah McGregor 9:53
Yeah, I love that piece of podcasting, where people because we are communicating orally we communicate in different ways. You know, I love the conversation as a genre and the way that it allows ideas to be sort of pulled apart and unpacked over time. And I agree that when you translate things into writing, especially for those of us who have been rigorously professionalized in a particular way of writing, that tends to sort of re-normalize it into this sort of standard, here's what academic work should look like. So my podcast Secret Feminist Agenda has transcripts, for accessibility reasons, they are shared exclusively as a sort of accessibility tool. They're just there beside the episode download link. But I have been resisting the desire to like, edit the transcripts and release them as a book, which, okay, you know, what I said, I've been resisting the desire, but that is a lie. Siobhan made me resist the desire. Yeah, because I was like, come on, let me just make this into a book and then we've got two outputs. And Siobhan made the very important point, that the whole argument of our project is that the podcast can stand alone, that it doesn't need to be retroactively legitimized by being turned into a book. So we've got the transcripts there and we are not going to edit them or clean them up, or re-circulate them in any formal ways. I still, like even as I'm saying this, I'm like, but whenever I finish this project, I kind of feel like I might want to put all the transcripts into a book just so I can look at them and be like, "look at all this work I did".
Am Johal 11:33
We're actually interestingly, in the process with some of our earlier episodes, we've done the transcription, but you know, sending them back to people that we interviewed, and trying to figure out a way to do you know, a small print run with publication studio, and it's not going to go through a scholarly process, because the timelines would be too long and that type of thing, just to try it out one time to see how it goes. So we're kind of experimenting with that as a notion. I'm just wondering, in terms of, you know, I think the wonderful thing about podcasting, in it's decentralized form, is that it creates these other types of conversations where you don't require the studio in a similar type of way. It creates a space for conversation where otherwise it might not happen. But if this kind of scholarly imprint or overlay gets placed on it, does it formalize something that's meant to be kind of amateurish and fun and playful? Does it become a buzzkill when you place a whatever peer review academic kind of zone into? Because to me, it kind of freaks me out a little bit.
Hannah McGregor 12:30
Yeah, yeah, no, 100%, the university ruins almost everything it touches. It's absolutely incredible how good it is at that. And I think podcasting as a medium, we're sort of looking at this wider moment of the professionalization of podcasting right now, where it's like, there's tech startup money to be made in the podcast world because Spotify keeps buying the startups that white dudes are making. So everybody's like, "Ooh, there's money in them hills." So everybody wants podcasting to turn into this, this startup model, right. But kind of the glory of podcasting as a medium is how weird and amateurish and non centralized it is and I think we're gonna see this professionalization moment come and go, and the medium is going to remain weird. And I think similarly, you know, as we think about how to use podcasts in the university, we could absolutely go in that super professionalized, you know, we want everything to look a certain way and sound a certain way and have the glossy professional veneer of the university on it. Or we can resist that and say, in fact, we're going to embrace how podcasting is always a little bit amateurish, a little bit informal, a little bit rough around the edges, and say, like, "Let's lean into that direction of things." And think about how that lets us, like, knock the university off its pedestal a little bit and find different ways of communicating what we're talking about.
Am Johal 13:55
It's interesting that with libraries, the public library has recording booths, SFU, I'm sure it's going to be adding those in the future and that type of thing. And it does then require a technical apparatus. I know other people like Roxanne and Jesse, she does hers over Skype and that kind of thing. And I'm just wondering, with your own podcast, what's been the most fun about doing Secret Feminist Agenda?
Hannah McGregor 14:17
Oh, the whole point of secret feminist agenda when I started it was how much fun I have talking to other feminists, and the way that sort of when I go for a while without those conversations, I start to feel a little bit like I am losing step with reality Like in this way, that when I spend too much time, you know, in the university, for example, talking to people who speak University speak, and I start to feel like, "Wait, am I the crazy one? Because everybody else here seems to think that this thing that this university is doing is decolonization. And I thought words meant things so... but everybody else is cool with it. And they'll give me a real weird look when I, you know, raise my hand. I'm like, you know, we're all lying, right?" Like, everybody's like, " Shh, don't say it." So sitting down with feminists always feels to me like not only, like a joyful learning experience, but also like, like, literally helps me to sort of believe that reality is reality again. So that was the whole point of the podcast was to have those conversations that feed me. And then to hope that listeners might also similarly feel fed by those conversations.
Am Johal 15:35
So you've interviewed people like Sara Ahmed, a whole bunch of other... Who else have you had the chance to interview?
Hannah McGregor 15:41
Oh, my God, so many people.
Am Johal 15:42
So many cool people.
Hannah McGregor 15:43
I have like such a hard time holding them all in my head. Because like, once I have finished something, I'm like, well, that episode is in the past. So I sometimes forget that I interviewed Sara Ahmed, even though I like cried three times during that interview, because it was amazing. I have to say that my favorite interviews are always the ones I do with my friends. I have a particularly good time talking to Lucila Renzi, I've talked to him on the podcast a number of times. I've recently done episodes with Dean and DeLuca, who is a Vancouver based poet. I just recorded an interview with Hilary Atleo, who is the founder of Iron Dog Books. And these are like sitting down with people who I know personally, who I know are wildly intelligent, interesting people, but who aren't famous for that thing, right? Who aren't sort of held up as this like icon. I mean, talking to Sarah Ahmed was like a career high for me. But everybody knows who Sarah Ahmed is, right? But people don't necessarily know who like my extremely cool friends are. But I think they're extremely cool. And I'm really excited to be like, let's talk about how cool you are.
Am Johal 16:51
Yeah, that's amazing.
Hannah McGregor 16:52
The whole project really is just about me being like feminists are neat. The tagline of a podcast "feminists are inherently interesting". I don't have to try to sell it because I'm just so excited about it.
Am Johal 17:02
Now around the peer review stuff you've been doing with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. One of the things I saw was that there were sort of public comments on it, or the forums of the review from the peer reviewers were made public, how did you land down on that as a way or a process to think through what peer review might look like for a podcast?
Hannah McGregor 17:21
Yeah, so that kind of went hand in hand with how we ended up deciding to just publish Secret Feminist Agenda episodes as I made them, and to do the peer review, retrospectively. So we decided to do it season by season, which was a great model because it gave me breaks in making podcasts, which is helpful. One of the comments from the first season of peer review was, this is not sustainable. Think about how you are going to build in breaks and build an endpoint for this project, which was such a helpful and extremely feminist piece of feedback. So we decided that we were going to be posting it and then doing the peer review after the fact and that I was going to be actively requesting feedback from my listeners and incorporating that into how I made the podcast. And so we decided that a closed peer review didn't fit the project at all, because the whole project was about being open and transparent, and iterative. And thinking communally along with the listeners, and then the idea of taking all of that work, and those conversations I was creating with this community, and then doing this peer review that was like secret, and they couldn't see felt super at odds with what we were doing. And so, again, it came from Siobhan, the idea of doing the peer review openly. And so she reached out to people because this isn't, we didn't invent the idea of open peer review, it's already a conversation that's happening in academia, is the idea of peer review being open or non anonymous. And so she reached out to people who she knew were already kind of involved in that conversation who might be willing to embark on this experiment with us. You know, it's it's all feminist scholars who have reviewed it. And there ended up being a lot of people who were game not only to do those first two rounds of peer review, in this open format, where they, you know, allowed their comments to be published on the press website. But also, our peer reviewers told us that they wanted to do their peer reviews collaboratively, because it felt weird to them to be sitting and writing alone, about, you know, something that was in fact about conversation. So for the third round of peer review, they recorded a podcast episode together, and then we put that up.
Am Johal 19:36
That's amazing. So I guess you're an assistant professor right now at some point you're going to go up for associate, the tenure review process. So does this go in a dossier like a couple of seasons of Secret Feminist Agenda with the peer reviewed like the how does that work even?
Hannah McGregor 19:52
Burn them some CDs. [laughs] No, so I have already gone up for renewal and done two rounds of salary reviews. So I've already had a chance to get a sense of how the institution will respond to these kinds of initiatives and I will say my department in particular is extremely supportive of this work. And that is because it is a publishing department, right? It's not a traditional discipline, it's an interdiscipline. And the other scholars who work in my department are people who are really interested in open access, and publicly engaged scholarship. And so they see what the podcast is doing. They embrace the spirit of the podcast, it feels more meaningful to my colleagues than it would if I wrote some traditional, you know, scholarly book, that for them would be like, okay, cool, but like, you know, is that in keeping with the ethos of the department, but the podcast feels to them like work that is, you know, in keeping with what we're all doing. So that has been great. And I've gotten a lot of support for it. And that's part of why I'm interested in figuring out ways to share these methods for peer review, and for sort of legitimising scholarly podcasting, because I do have the privilege of being in a department where this work is supported, where I can do it, and it will count towards my tenure. But just because it counts towards my tenure doesn't mean it will count for anybody else. And there is something so vital about making community engaged scholarship count, because the people at universities who disproportionately take on community engaged scholarship are queer and racialized faculty who come into the university with a strong sense of preexisting community responsibilities. And so continue to do serious work engaging and speaking to communities. And when we don't legitimize that, it means that we are putting this extra burden on already minoritized faculty of saying, you have to do all of the regular work, and then keep doing this other work, which is like maybe kind of why we hired you in the first place for this other work, but we're not going to count any of it. So you also have to do all this other work too. You know, which leads to faculty burnout, leads to wide scale salary discrepancies, because people can't get the research grants they're supposed to be getting because we're doing this other work, blah, blah, blah. So like, it matters to take this wider range, particularly of community-engaged research and figure out ways to say like, yeah, actually, this counts and here's how we're going to figure out how to count it.
Am Johal 22:28
Now you're going to be teaching a semester in podcasting class next year. Wondering if you could chat about that?
Hannah McGregor 22:34
Yeah, yeah, I'm delighted. So this is based on the absolutely thrilling semester in dialogue model created by the center for dialogue, where they've created these semester-long, like 15 credit courses. So it's like the only course students take that semester. And it provides the space in which you can take on pretty tricky ideas and topics with students and really unpack them over a lot of time. I have yet to teach a formalized podcasting course. Because podcasts are iterative, for one thing, right, like you make multiple episodes over time, so it's really hard to figure out how that would fit in a standard course. But also, because there's so many hard skills and soft skills, what a gross, I hate that. I hate that language. But like, there's so many sort of technical things that you need to wrap your head around to make a podcast, you know, it's a low barrier to access medium, but it's not a no barrier to access medium. And then there's also all of this other stuff, like what can we do with it? Like once we figure out how to make a podcast, what kind of stories can we tell? And I'm really thrilled that we'll have sort of the time and space in this course, to not only be like, let's learn how to use microphones, let's learn how to use editing software, let's learn how to do all of this kind of stuff. And then say, "Okay, now that you're equipped with this skill set, what can we do?"
Am Johal 23:58
Amazing.
Hannah McGregor 23:59
Yeah, yeah, I can't wait.
Am Johal 24:00
I just think it's so interesting, all of the different things you're working on and trying to embed it within the academic zone. It's a series of areas you're fighting back against.
[laughs]
Hannah McGregor 24:11
Yeah, I have a real tendency to be a little fighty.
Am Johal 24:14
And what kind of podcasts are you listening to these days?
Hannah McGregor 24:17
Oh, my God, I listened to so many podcasts. I listen to probably about 20 podcasts on a weekly basis. So I will say like, the three newest podcasts that if started listening to in the past sort of month or so that I'm equally delighted with: number one, The Sandy and Nora show, absolutely phenomenal Canadian politics podcast made by two organizers who unpack a Canadian political story every week, but with a real eye towards the question of how you can organize towards change. So it's like, you get your news. You get a sort of sophisticated unpacking of a story, but then you're not left with that often sort of post news podcast malaise of like, "Oh no, the world's on fire", because it is, but, you know, they direct you towards like, okay, and you know, here are the actions people are taking and here are some things you can do. So I love that. I just started listening to a podcast called Fan tie. I believe I'm pronouncing that right. It's a new podcast from the maximum fun network. It is two queer black culture critics talking about what it means to be a fan of something and also against something and trying to do so with sort of nuance. So the episode I'm listening to was literally listening to as I walked over here is about Gayle King and an interview she conducted after Kobe Bryant's death, talking about the rape allegations against him, and then the response against her by black men. And the way that that sort of speaks to the complexities of rape culture and white supremacy within black communities. Like it's such a good, fun, upbeat podcast that's also like, super sophisticated. And then I've also recently started listening to an improvisational Dungeons and Dragons podcast, in which I listened to a lot of d&d podcasts. I'm really cool. [Am laughs] In which all of the voice actors are webcomics, they are all people who like know each other because they all make webcomics, it is called Rude Tales of Magic, and it is very silly. So yeah, I just like to have like, a lot of different tones and styles and genres have podcasts available to me so that depending on my mood and my activity, like I don't always want to listen to serious politics. I sometimes want to listen to a very silly improvised story about people breaking a Birdman out of a prison.
Am Johal 26:44
Hannah McGregor, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Hannah McGregor 26:47
Thank you.
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Paige Smith 26:50
We hope you enjoyed our conversation with podcasting, phenom, and SFU publishing scholar Hannah MacGregor, stay in the loop with Below the Radar by following us on Facebook at Below the Radar pod and on Twitter at BTR underscore pod and be sure to subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks again for listening
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