I’ve never understood why more PhD students and Early Career Researchers don’t produce podcasts. I’ve wondered this for a long time and the question came back to me when reading this post on LSE Impact. I think she overstates the case slightly (both in terms of the degree to which social media reproduces existing hierarchies and the extent to which podcasts level them) but it’s an important argument nonetheless:
I’m extremely optimistic about the use of podcasts because academia is a slow ‘industry’ and often only a few people hear about your work. With a podcast the focus is on your research topic and you can quickly share your results. Findings are also made more accessible and engaging for people outside of the academic bubble, and who are often directly applicable to the results. In addition, social science research can become sanitised when researchers are left to summarise their findings in a few lines. By literally giving researchers a voice, findings become more exciting as people are allowed to animate their findings and bring character to their research, which I think does more justice to the research that they carry out.
Mark Carrigan 