Giving voice to the community: Embodied scholarship, open peer review, and other affordances of scholarly podcasting
Amber Sewell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, amber.sewell@unlv.edu
[narrative biography, no more than 125 words]
[URL for uni directory]
Abstract: Scholarly publishing often focuses on the end product–a journal article, a monograph–with little homage paid to those who, formally and informally, helped shape the artifact. As open movements gain momentum and support, and the peer review process faces scrutiny, there is an opportunity to reevaluate the purpose of scholarly publishing and its artifacts, the ways in which our current publishing model shapes our perspective of knowledge production as a largely individual endeavor. Scholarly podcasting can be one way in which we re-envision what publishing looks–and sounds–like. By its very nature, podcasting allows scholars to audibly embody their work, bringing their personhood and identities into the expression of their research. Open peer review podcasting, a facet of scholarly podcasting, can bring to the forefront the ways in which a community of scholars ultimately shapes a final product, refocusing the purpose of peer review on supportive critique that yields a more meaningful and robust final artifact, rather than the box-ticking or gatekeeping purposes it sometimes serves in the current publishing landscape. This article explores the ways in which scholarly podcasting provides researchers an opportunity to bring not only their identities into their work, but their communities, making visible–and audible–the very real network of individuals that make a solo authored artifact possible. By undergoing open peer review via podcast, and distilling the conversation and making visible the changes made to the article based on that conversation, this article both explores the theoretical possibilities of scholarly podcasting while modeling the process. Various ways of engaging in scholarly podcasting are identified, and their strengths and challenges examined.
As someone who never thought they would end up in higher education, I did not pay too much attention to scholarly publishing until I was ready to write my first article during my second Masters degree. I had conducted my project almost wholly independently, and it made sense to write the article solo, as well. Anxious about my first scholarly piece written for publication, I did not ask any of my peers to read it over before I submitted it to a journal. It was not peer reviewed, so the journal editors and I exchanged a few versions of the document before it was published.
It would be a few years, once I was a practicing academic librarian teaching first- and second-year students about scholarly publishing as a field, that I came to understand the problems inherent with the traditional model. The few times I asked someone to look over an article before I submitted it to a journal vastly improved the initial draft, and as I started learning more about writing in community, open peer review, and other forms of knowledge production and dissemination that differed from my first (or second) experience, I came to see the value in not only approaching my work as not wholly singular, but how even those traditional experiences weren’t as independent as I thought. The invisible labor of peer review and journal editing that isn’t reflected in the final article, where a single author’s name is listed. The way I and others enrich our work by informally calling on our community to contribute their knowledge and experience to shape an article in ways that readers will never know about. How we brainstorm together, share articles and podcasts and opinion pieces to contribute to a project we know our peers are working on, how we create our own informal communities that are sometimes thanked in a small acknowledgment section at the end of a journal article, but often aren’t visible to those outside our circles.
As a listener of podcasts for over two decades, I never stopped to think about the types of podcasts that appealed to me. As a nerd, I listened to nerdy podcasts, from history to sciences to literature studies. Then I found my way into the idea that some podcasts are scholarly, and are a totally different form of knowledge dissemination that both appealed to me as someone who doesn’t take my scholarly identity seriously, and as an academic librarian, where many of the affordances of scholarly podcasting align with our professional values. I became an enthusiastic advocate for this form of knowledge production and dissemination that allows us to honor the communities that contribute to disembodied lines on our CVs, that circumvents journal subscriptions, that produces content that even a casual listener can engage with. And I want to highlight that potential whenever I can, even if I haven’t been in this room the longest.
This article explores how scholarly podcasts allow for knowledge production and dissemination models that better highlight the collaborative nature of creating scholarly outputs. In particular, it explores how podcasting as a modality affords scholars to more easily engage in embodied scholarship and open peer review. [more about the open peer review process]
Scholarly publishing norms are well established. Monographs and peer-reviewed journal articles are the most widely valued research outputs in academia. These texts–because the written word is a held in higher esteem than other modalities–adhere to “the kind of masculinist norms of the academy values… solitary, disembodied, serious, earnest, rational scholarship” that “valorises that as the only way to produce knowledge and be an intellectual”*. Laura L. Ellingson argues that “The privilege of the mind over the body is deeply engrained in western cultures and hence within conventional research methodologies'', further stating that “The performance of ‘disembodied researcher’ has been repeated for so long that it functions as a set of naturalized norms that privilege a masculinist rationality as the only legitimate form of knowledge”*. Not only is the successful researcher disembodied and masculine, they are often solo authors, implying that their publications are the result of a single mind, irrespective of the editors, colleagues, and reviewers who also made the work possible. These norms are most commonly upheld by tenure and promotion standards; these guidelines govern what work is deemed valuable enough for scholars to attain a permanent position at their institutions.
In some ways, open movements–sometimes called open science or open scholarship–are a response to traditional forms of knowledge production and dissemination*. Open scholarship “is both a concept and a practice, and the assumptions about it vary depending on the context in which openness is discussed.”* It means “making all practices, processes and products of the scientific world open and freely accessible” and includes open research materials such as “open access materials, open data, open code, open software, and any other resource evolving from a research process”, as well as open teaching materials, or open educational resources*. Open peer review, as part of this movement, seeks to improve the traditional peer-review process by shortening the time between submission and publication, producing better quality reviews and articles, holding reviewers accountable for conducting themselves professionally, increasing transparency in the process, and making invisible labor visible, among other benefits*. It can include open identities, open reports, open participation, open pre-review manuscripts, open final-version commenting, open interaction, and open platforms*.
Another venue for challenging norms in the knowledge production and dissemination typically undertaken in academia is public scholarship. Similar to open scholarship, public scholarship involves sharing research with audiences outside of traditionally academic settings, including social media, blog posts and opinion pieces, and podcasts. Public scholarship goes one step further than many forms of open scholarship (although given the numerous interpretations of ‘open’ work, one could argue they are often the same) by tackling not only access–often defined in economic terms–as a barrier, but also “hard-to-read texts, …images without alternative text descriptions that pose difficulties for people with visual impairments” and “access to the internet, which is not universal”*. Not only that, but public scholarship is created with different audiences in mind. Grounded in feminist theory, it can “[upturn] the deeply oppressive norms around who does or who does not get to occupy spaces and produce the kinds of scholarly work that the academy values”*. Hannah McGregor explains that “Open and public scholarship gives us an opportunity not to throw out these institutionalized norms, but to fundamentally reconsider the work they’re doing.”* Works of public scholarship “such as books, blogs, podcasts, zines, websites, exhibitions, and articles hold little weight in a tenure file”, but rethinking peer review, possibly by implementing open peer review, “can make public scholarship more palatable to tenure and promotion committees.”* Some professional associations, such as the American Historical Association, have pushed to make their tenure and promotion guidelines more accepting of public scholarship*, but often it is colleagues who compose a department or institution’s tenure and process committee that uphold “the conservatism around what constitutes the scholarly”*.
Scholarly podcasting is part of what Mack Hagood calls “audio academia,” which he describes as “a diverse collection of initiatives aimed at producing and communicating scholarship through electronic audio in the form of podcasts, audiobooks, online lectures, and other genres.”* Situated in that framework, scholarly podcasts are “the communication of scholarly knowledge through the digital medium of podcasting,” which “can be a radical, open, and subversive way of creating publicly accessible and community engaged scholarship.”* They can “bring a re-orientation, sense of exploration, and renewed community building to the research experience”*, as well as reinforce “the connection between the university and society at large,” making research “accessible to a far greater audience than written materials could ever reach.”* Ian M. Cook goes even further in exploring the potential of scholarly podcasts, claiming “that for many scholars podcasting is an insurgency against academic structures that curb creativity, inhibit personal and collective transformations, and promote self-interest over generosity”, instead creating “the conditions for scholars to be immersed in their curiosity”*. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry situate podcasting as part of the open movement “that challenges the structures of traditional academic publishing”*.
Just as many concepts within the open movement do not have a single agreed-upon definition, defining scholarly podcasts proves difficult.
Academic podcasts have been used for teaching [citations], public scholarship [citations], and to facilitate conversations between scholars [citations]; others are created for non-scholarly purposes, made by academics, journalists, and others about topics of interest that are scholarly in nature, but not necessarily intended for a scholarly audience [citation]. This takes advantage of the niche nature of podcasting as a form of media; listeners enjoy taking deep dives into hyperspecific topics*, and scholarly podcasting has demonstrated “audiences’ desire for intellectual content with many listeners wanting deep dives into topics and themes.”*
To illustrate the potential of one of the affordances of scholarly podcasting, this article will both explore the theoretical possibilities of scholarly podcasting and model the impact of undergoing open peer review via podcast. The first phase was to write an initial draft exploring the affordances, models, and challenges of scholarly podcasting. The editor of this special issue connected me to two reviewers, who received the draft article. The reviewers engaged with the article separately, but rather than exchange critiques and suggestions asynchronously via written text, they joined a guest host and myself on an episode of The LibParlor Podcast, an open peer review podcast for information professionals. The peer review took place via moderated discussion on the podcast episode, modeling the affordances of open peer review podcasting laid out in this article. The episode is available for listeners (link) who are interested in how this conversational peer review was conducted.
Inspired by Emily Ford’s format for her book Stories of Open, the conversational peer review is distilled into text throughout this article in order to demonstrate the impact of this form of peer review for the reading audience. The main text of the article is formatted consistently with the rest of the journal. Distillations of the conversation held in the open peer review podcast episode will begin at the left margin and printed in [sans-serif font]. An accounting of the changes made to the main text based on the conversational peer review will begin indented twice and printed in [other font]. While interested readers should listen to the peer review to fully experience this type of scholarly engagement, I hope the format of this article effectively conveys its impact to readers.
The affordances of scholarly podcasting have been detailed in various publications with much greater breadth than I will fit into this article; however, I hope to offer an explorations of the affordances of this form of communication as they relate to their potential to give voice to the communities of people who make scholarly research possible, from the researchers themselves to the editors, reviewers, and even research participants.
The typical writing found in scholarly texts reflects the western, masculine norms that have shaped academia. Any “writing that is playful, personal, narrative, emotive or non-linear” is discouraged* through editorial guidelines, an opaque peer review process that requires the self to be removed from the work, and the opinions of peers that serve on tenure and promotion committees. Podcasting, as Lynn M. Harter explains, “stretches the tendencies and capabilities of academics toward multi-sensorial forms of inquiry and… connects academics with broader publics”*. Yves Rees, an Australian historian and podcaster, said that podcasting is about “being fun and about it being collaborative and about it being embodied. … And I’ve come to really think about that mode of knowledge production as a feminist intervention.”*
Podcasting facilitates embodied scholarship in a number of ways. At the most basic level, podcasting gives scholarship a literal voice. Simply the act of speaking about your work out loud “allows you to be more honest about the fact that you’re a person behind those results”*. Parts of your identity are revealed in the audio medium that are intentionally absent from most written scholarship, where “naturalized norms in the academy privilege prose in which bodies appear irrelevant to the production of knowledge.”* This human element facilitates a space where connections are more easily made between the researcher and the listener where “This embodied experience of podcasting on the part of the producer and the listener is entangled in a politics of voice, of what voices are heard and who holds the power in how their stories and experiences are shared through sound.”* This political piece is something often remarked upon, calling up the potential of podcasts to be a radical, feminist space to challenge these existing norms around knowledge production. Creating scholarly podcasts gives voice not just to the researcher who would be singular author of the monograph or journal article; producers of these podcasts can invite fellow researchers, research participants, and reviewers to share the space. They can model an ethics of care, demonstrating how research can be collaborative and supportive, participatory and inclusive. For instance, researchers studying particular communities can invite their research participants to participate in the creation of the podcast, and the communities they are part of will have access to that research once published.
Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland’s 2022 Kairos piece demonstrates several aspects of giving voice to community, as well as the political potential of scholarly podcasting. Rather than read aloud the works they were citing, they invited the authors of those works to record themselves reading the selection of their work McGregor and Copeland were referencing*. One of academic librarianship’s principle frames is scholarship as conversation*, and this act of subverting the normally solo act of citation puts this frame into practice in a unique way. It actively engages scholars whose work they were referencing into this scholarship as conversation, at the same time affording them the chance to embody their scholarship in a way they may not have previously. By simply making the request, McGregor and Copeland may have introduced a new way of thinking about their own work, and the nature of scholarship in general, to these authors, and as a result, the listeners who engaged with the final piece.
Ellingson states that “engaging multiple audiences through public intellectualism may be facilitated when embodied elements of research processes and outcomes enable audiences beyond academia to respond viscerally and with immediacy to the messages researchers share.”* As a form of public scholarship, they invite listeners to become part of a community of knowledge. Podcasts have been studied as sites of public pedagogy*, and just as many instructors aim to make their lessons accessible by reducing jargon and not assuming previous knowledge, podcasts encourage the same practices*. By communicating our work via audio, we can lean instinctively toward creating a narrative, and can communicate our work as an active participant in its shaping, rather than positioning ourselves as a removed, objective observer.
Open peer review has been slowly gaining momentum, part of the open movement that encompasses open access journals and open educational resources. A formal definition of open peer review has yet to be widely accepted; there are varying degrees of openness, some of which facilitate dialogue between authors and reviewers as part of the process, and others that simply mean the identities of all parties are known throughout the process that largely still follows the traditional peer review*. This variability carries over into open peer review podcasts, which have been used to review scholarly podcasts as well as more traditional written scholarly articles.
One type of open peer review podcast entails submitting a text to reviewers, who each read, and sometimes comment upon, that text individually, then come together to engage in dialogue about the text without the authors present. This conversation may address predetermined questions, similar to those a journal might provide reviewers; it can be guided by the reviewers’ notes and suggestions, or it can combine the two, mimicking a semi-structured interview by using questions as a guide that takes the background to the natural conversations that arise. This recording is then shared with the author, who chooses how to interpret and implement the feedback, if at all. Some peer review podcasts are created as a discussion about a text or texts, but are never intended for the author to respond to by revising the initial text.
Another form of open peer review podcast has the author join the reviewers for a conversational peer review. This format allows reviewers and authors to engage in discussion, probing deeper into ideas and asking clarifying questions in the moment. Conversational peer review can be less structured, as the benefit of giving reviewers and authors space to discuss the work includes delving into rabbit holes, co-developing new directions of thought and making new connections borne from the collaborative, generative space. This method of open peer review effectively highlights the interconnected nature of research; just as we often seek colleagues to bounce new ideas off of because we value the diversity of perspectives of those around us, bringing together researcher and reviewer in a conversational space makes public the underlying purpose of peer review–bringing together experts to co-create knowledge.
Regardless of structure, one of the benefits of this type of discussion is the dialogue that arises when reviewers discuss the text together. The identities and experiences of each reviewer grant them a unique perspective on the content, and an open peer review podcast highlights how the interplay of positionalities influences the reading and interpretation of a text. Adding the researcher to this discussion adds another layer of richness, and increases the potential of knowledge co-creation, as the researcher contributes their perspective built upon unique positionalities that guided the research. Instead of offering critiques built upon assumed intent, an open peer review podcast with researcher and reviewers present more effectively addresses the intention of the research and sidesteps one of the frustrations of traditional peer review, wherein the author receives useless feedback due to a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of content (and often an inability to clarify).
A quick survey of the literature about scholarly podcasting will reveal that there is no one way to create scholarly podcasts. Podcasts themselves have become difficult to define; what used to simply be audio made available to anyone via RSS feed has now evolved into its own broad media environment, with video podcasts, subscription models that sometimes paywall content, and other forms that push at the boundaries of that initial definition. It makes sense that there is no neat box to fit scholarly podcasting into, either. A look at H-Podcast’s academic podcast roundup demonstrates just how flexible the term scholarly podcast is, featuring everything from small independent productions to popular shows like 99% Invisible*. Below are just a few models of scholarly podcasting that are worth putting forward as places for people to get started with the genre, both as listeners and creators.
In 2005, clinician and Cambridge virology lecturer, and host of podcast The Naked Scientist, Chris Smith approached Nature about creating a podcast to accompany the well-known scientific journal*. The podcast, which is still being produced today under a multimedia department that currently has five members on the editorial staff page*, is freely available and features highlights of the latest issues, interviews with authors, and hosts discussing recent research of interest. Smith credits this as the first ever journal podcast*, and others have followed suit, whether in creating a podcast for their journal like Nature Podcast, or by publishing podcasts as texts themselves. Publishing within existing scholarly journals is a good option for scholars who are looking to try this format for the first time, or have content that is best conveyed in a single episode rather than in a serial format.
The degree to which these podcasts take advantage of the affordances of scholarly podcasts as a genre varies. Those that are simply audio versions of a traditionally written article may include some elements of embodiment–the author’s voice is heard by the listener, and carries with it some inflection and emphasis absent from the written text–but adds little else to the work. That said, the work of categorizing podcasts always comes with exceptions. Podcasting allows for the incorporation of more elements than just voice; music and other sound effects, audible transitions from one section of the paper to another, enable scholars to shape even this text written for the scholarly audience. In William K. Rawlins’s performance text, “Sample”, he includes the abstract of a research article published in a scholarly journal*. While not published in or as a podcast, “[t]he wonderful discordance in hearing Rawlins sing the research jargon along with music played on a guitar is provocative and inspiring”* and illustrates one way transforming scholarship to an audio format can change the work.
Other journals publish podcasts as texts alongside written work. Ted Riecken’s 2015 podcast exploring the role of multimedia in scholarship was featured in a special issue of the McGill Journal of Education*; it was the only submission on multimedia in/as scholarship that was itself a form of multimedia, and was accidentally an experiment in open peer review via podcast*. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy publishes webtexts, “projects developed with specific attention to the World Wide Web as a publishing medium”*; they have published several podcasts as a result.
A challenge of creating podcasts for scholarly journals is the question of editing these submissions. One motivation for creating podcasts rather than a written article is the embodiment affordance–how do you create editorial guidelines for scholarly podcasts that reflect the standards of the journal while allowing podcast authors the freedom to take full advantage of the medium? Anyone can create a podcast, but the quality of production, audio, and other elements will vary based on their experience, time, and resources. The reviewers for one podcast submission to Kairos grappled with this in their open audio peer-review, one reviewer sharing they were “frankly dreading listening to the podcasts because I’ve heard a lot of really bad low-production academic podcasts”, and later sharing that “[p]art of me hates to ask them to make revisions because it’s such a polished piece at this point”*. As someone who started their own scholarly podcast with no previous podcasting experience, I understand challenges with production quality and the imposter syndrome that may come along with trying a new medium. I was fortunate that I work in a library with resources and people who were able to help guide me through the process, and in a position where it could be considered one of my job duties, but others will not have those privileges. One solution would be for journals to have their own production team for podcasts; this resolves several barriers for scholars new to podcasting, including access to production software, as well as the time and labor involved for learning these tools. This choice does, however, take away some of the agency of embodiment from the researcher. As scholarly podcasting gains momentum and develops as its own field of study, it will be interesting to keep an eye on how they are incorporated into academic journals.
Another challenge this format presents is identifying scholarly journals willing to publish a podcast as an output. While journals like Kairos explicitly welcome such output, others require authors be willing to propose podcasts as scholarly outputs and negotiate with the editorial staff if the journal does not already have procedures in place for publishing podcasts.
Networks provide another option for publishing scholarly podcasts. These networks perform various functions: some provide a place for podcasters to publish their work (e.g., Amplify Podcast Network and New Books Network), while others serve as sites to facilitate discussion and sharing of resources about scholarly podcasting (e.g., Humanities Podcast Network and H-Podcast). Those that publish podcasts have their own scope and policies, just as journals do. Publishing scholarly podcasts through these networks have a number of advantages: networks have an established audience, they often handle distribution and archiving of episodes, and many provide resources to assist podcast hosts. Amplified Podcast Network’s Resonate stream is the first to facilitate peer review of scholarly podcasts*, and “[p]ublication under the Resonate stream serves as professional attestation that your podcast has undergone a university press-led editorial process, a formal peer review, in-house publishing design, publication distribution, and promotion”*. The websites for these networks do not provide information about the level of editorial involvement in the podcasts they publish or the standards they require from their podcasts; Amplify’s submission guidelines for the Resonate stream state that “prior to submission for further editorial engagement…a podcast must be reasonably well polished”, and that, upon acceptance, “the Senior Editor will communicate further guidelines for the final preparation of files for publication”*, while New Books Network simply directs interested parties to contact the editor-in-chief*. These standards and guidelines for publishing podcasts with scholarly networks could be an interesting area of research, studying the balance between the expression of embodiment through sound with maintaining the standards of the network itself.
Perhaps the most popular model of scholarly podcasting is independent publishing. This is in part because there are so few formal opportunities for publishing, and also in part due to the amorphous nature of scholarly podcasting. Some podcast creators do not consider their show scholarly, whereas other scholarly podcasts are created by people outside academia, including journalists and former academics*.
Those who publish their podcasts independently manage the entire process on their own, or with a team they have formed, from production to editing to dissemination. They are responsible for creating their own guidelines around content, identifying a hosting platform, uploading files, and marketing. They may archive their podcast through an institutional repository, creating a backup should their hosting platform ever disappear and providing it with a stable identifier. Some may later become part of podcasting networks (e.g., This Podcast Will Kill You, a podcast by two epidemiologists that first aired in 2017, joined the Exactly Right Podcast Network in 2018*), but are often carried by a small, passionate team for whom making the podcast is not a full-time job.
Publishing podcasts independently gives scholars the most ability to fully embrace the affordances of podcasting as scholarship. Whether intentionally creating a show as an act of public scholarship, or deciding that recording conversations with friends about topics of interest and relevance to academia is a fun way to spend time together, publishing outside of a journal or network allows scholars to create their own guidelines. This also means that often, podcast creators are lacking the support that editorial staff and podcasting networks can provide. They may not perform scholarly rigor in a way that is recognized by their colleagues, and it may take a while to build an audience.
The last model examined in this piece, though by no means the last model of scholarly podcasting in general, is open peer review. Open peer review is not necessary to create a scholarly podcast; open peer review podcasts can also be created about a text that is not itself a podcast. The review can be conducted by scholars, or, one could argue that by creating communities around their content, comments, discussion forums, and other forms of listener engagement serve as a type of open peer review. Who are the peers you are creating content for, and what is the function of the review?
In some instances, open peer review podcasting has been used by journals to peer-review podcasts submitted as scholarly texts. Sometimes the author is present to discuss the work with the reviewers, and other times the reviewers hold the discussion without the authors present. These are opportunities, as the Kairos team put it, to “...disrupt assumptions about modalities of knowledge production and where, how, and by whom it should take place by pushing back against text-only communication as the default, and by creating spaces to foreground the embodied voices of the people doing this work”*.
Peer reviewed podcast Secret Feminist Agenda was the first of its kind*, and implemented a different type of open peer review. Podcast episodes were published in seasons, and reviewers were invited at the end of the season to discuss the season based on a selection of episodes assigned to them. Peer-reviews of seasons one and two are posted in textual form, but the review of season three was posted as a podcast episode itself*, to which podcast creator Hannah McGregor and Wilfrid Laurier University Press Senior Editor Siobhan McMenemy posted their own response*.
These formats of open peer review podcasts, where reviewers come together to discuss a work, take advantage of many of the affordances of podcasting. It makes sense to evaluate a piece of audio scholarship in the same modality, and the conversational nature of open peer review podcasts assist reviewers in challenging ingrained behaviors of peer reviewing, as demonstrated in the discussion between Kairos reviewers when one participant started a conversation by asking “Am I trying to like mansplain citations to these people?”, which led to a reflection on the common practice of second-guessing authors’ work “in this white masculine sort of way [that] wants to be like, hey I know something, I have an idea I want to share it with you”*.
Another format of open peer review podcasting exists, wherein scholars participate in the review process to “get peer reviews on their research before it is ‘published’ in the traditional sense (i.e. in a peer-reviewed academic journal)”*. This type of open peer review podcasting mimics a process many scholars already undergo by informally asking a colleague to read over a manuscript before submitting it for formal peer review facilitated by a journal. In this model, demonstrated by the Open Peer Review Podcast, “the research is made accessible to a non-academic audience, while at the same time the researcher has an opportunity to unpack their ideas with the peer reviewer in real time”*. Because the researcher is a participant in this type of open peer review podcasting, this form reaches its full generative potential. Misunderstandings can be resolved in real time, participants can leverage their unique identities and experiences to brainstorm and make important connections, and the podcast itself serves as a public demonstration of the community work that goes into publishing even a solo-authored article.
In addition to the challenges of the particular models detailed above, scholarly podcasting faces larger challenges to becoming a more common practice. An inherent risk with embodied scholarship is that as we are more transparent about our identities and positionalities, we increase our vulnerability to discrimination because as Zoe Wake Hyde observed, openness itself is not equitable*. Tenure and promotion forms another well-documented challenge; while some disciplines have pushed for recognition of podcasting as scholarship, others are resistant to the idea that podcasting as a form of public scholarship holds the same value as a monograph or article*. There is caution among some scholars that pushing for podcasts to become a recognized form of scholarship may strip them of their radical potential; by trying to conform podcasts to standards for monographs and articles, are they replicating hierarchical systems rather than breaking them? With so many different models of scholarly podcasting, I think it is not an either/or scenario. Some scholars will find themselves in situations where they can freely take advantage of the affordances of podcasting as a medium to share their work, whereas others will need to perhaps reshape their vision to resemble something more recognizable to more traditional scholars; after all, creating and producing podcasts is a labor intensive process. Often scholars may do both, doing the work to achieve tenure that will then open doors for more experimental work later.
While traditional norms of scholarly publishing adhere to western, masculine traits of disembodiment, independence, and objectivity, open and public scholarship are movements that challenge these as the superior forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Scholarly podcasts are one format of open and public scholarship that take advantages of the affordances of the modality in ways that can demonstrate a more inclusive, feminist, care-based approach to scholarship that not only gives the researcher an embodied voice, but provides opportunity for the entire community that enables and supports knowledge production to be heard and valued as part of that process.
This article was an experiment in producing a written text reflecting on the possibilities of scholarly podcasting while at the same time demonstrating the impact of using one of these open practices by undergoing open peer review via podcast. [more words reflecting on how the open peer review process went]. Future scholars may eliminate the written word as a step, choosing instead to fully embrace these affordances by creating a scholarly podcast of their own.
Emily Ford, Stories of Open: Opening Peer Review through Narrative Inquiry (Chicago: ACRL, 2021).
Parinita Shetty, “Marginally Fannish: Fan Podcasts as Sites of Public Pedagogy and Intersectional Education” (Doctoral dissertation, University of Leeds, 2022).
Alex D. Ketchum, Engage in Public Scholarship: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication (Concordia University Press, 2022).
Amelia McDonell-Parry, “‘My Favorite Murder’ Hosts Launch Podcast Network”, Rolling Stone (2018), https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/my-favorite-murder-hosts-podcast-network-760885/.
“About,” Open Peer Review Podcast, accessed February 14, 2024, https://oprpodcast.ca/about/.
Tony Ross-Hellauer, “What Is Open Peer Review? A Systematic Review,” F1000Research (2017): 588, https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2.
Emily Ford, “Defining and Characterizing Open Peer Review: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 44, 4 (2013): 311–26, http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jsp.44-4-001.
Ishani Ganguli, “A science podcaster bares all,” The Scientist (2006). https://www.the-scientist.com/a-science-podcaster-bares-all-47514
Amber Sewell, "A Case for Open Peer Review Podcasting in Academic Librarianship," portal: Libraries and the Academy 23, 4, 799-818 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2023.a908702.
Ted Riecken, “Mapping the Fit between Research and Multimedia: A Podcast Exploration of the Place of Multimedia within/as Scholarship,” McGill Journal of Education 49, 3 (2014), https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/mje/2014-v49-n3-mje02117/1033545ar/.
Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland, “Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count,” Kairos 27, 1 (2022), https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html.
Carl Leggo, Anthony Paré, and Ted Riecken, “Peer-Reviewer Round Table Response to Ted Riecken’s Scholarly Podcast, ‘Mapping the Fit Between Research and Multimedia: A Podcast Exploration of the Place of Multimedia within/as Scholarship,’” McGill Journal of Education 49, 3 (2014), https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/mje/2014-v49-n3-mje02117/1033556ar/
Mack Hagood, “The Scholarly Podcast: Form and Function in Audio Academia,” in Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, Jeremy Wade Morris and Eric Hoyt, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 180–95, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11435021.
Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor, A Guide to Academic Podcasting (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.51644/9781777948801.
Stacey Copeland and Jason Camlot, “Jason Camlot and the SpokenWeb,” Amplified (blog), March 22, 2022, https://amplifypodcastnetwork.ca/2022/03/22/amplified-jason-camlot-and-the-spokenweb/.
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