With the rise of podcasting as a forum for academic conversations and as a teaching tool, Hannah McGregor of SFU’s Publishing department set out to investigate — and enact — podcasting as a form of scholarly communication, knowledge mobilization, and open pedagogy. Hannah is in conversation with host Am Johal about her research into the exciting potentials of scholarly podcasting, and the power of the podcast as a grassroots, decentralized medium.
Johal, A. (n.d.). Podcasting as Scholarship. Retrieved August 12, 2021, from https://www.sfu.ca/sfuwoodwards/community-engagement/Below-the-Radar/episodes/episodes1/ep72-hannah-mcgregor.html
A couple of years ago I described a process for inserting podcast creation into a workflow that integrated with traditional models of academic and scholarly practice. The idea was to demonstrate that there’s a lot of overlap with creating a podcast and what we think of as scholarship and that with a few minor tweaks, we could probably start adding podcasts to our other, more formal, academic outputs.
This episode adds several other dimensions to what I initially described, including the notion that the ‘podcast-as-academic-output’ should not conform to formal academic outputs, as well as the idea that the peer review process could be collaborative and published as a podcast. I really like both of these ideas.
Podcasts are informal and to try and force them into a traditional publication workflow would probably take away something that makes them enjoyable. I also like the fact that adding too many layers on top of what is already a relatively time-consuming process would limit the utility of the format.
And then I obviously love the suggestion that peer review could be 1) collaborative, and 2) published as a podcast. Peer review should be more like a collegial conversation with colleagues who have an interest in the topic, as well as in making the output the best version that it could be.
There’s a lot of food for thought in this episode. If you’re interested in scholarship and more creative expressions of academic output, this is well worth a listen.