Podcasts as a Form of Scholarship
By Anuli Akanegbu (NYU and The BLK IRL Podcast)
Although our work as anthropologists is propelled by formal and informal verbal communication, “the interview” as a mode of knowledge-making rarely transcends beyond the domain of “mere methodology” in our discipline (Briggs 1986). In other words, interviews commonly serve as a method towards the “real work” of writing or media production rather than the product itself. In this reflexive essay, I position podcasting as a form of public scholarship where the interview transcends the domain of methodology to become a central analytic focus by providing an account of some of my experiences independently producing my own podcast, The BLK IRL Podcast. Here, I follow the work of Briggs (1986, 2007) to engage an anthropology of the interview as a means of facing issues of power and representation in fieldwork.
Before I introduce you to my podcast, I’d like to share a bit about the focus of my doctoral research. My work is largely concerned with exploring how race and desirability factor into the success of Black social media content creators in the United States. I’m primarily interested in individuals who can be described as full-time “influencers.” Duffy (2017) defines influencers as brand evangelists who actively post sponsored content on social media due to their perceived influence on the purchasing habits of their followers. In addition to my interest in examining “influencing” as a career and influencers as a labor force within the “creative economy,” my work also insists on a geographical shift in research about social media from the American West (e.g., Silicon Valley and Los Angeles) to the American South, which for the purposes of my project is the city of Atlanta, GA.
The phrase “Black in real life” originated as a quip I would make to friends when discussing my own observations about how “Blackness”—or, more concretely, Black people—became aestheticized and commodified in popular culture. I was expressing a frustration with the sharing of social media posts and statements by “allies” of all stripes last year to signify their belief that “Black Lives Matter.” To be clear, I am never offended by posts or statements of support, but I can get offended by performative activism, and for me, the utterance of “I’m Black in real life” was my way of saying, “Yes, you can share posts in support of Black people online, but how do you treat the Black people you engage with when you are away from the keyboard?” The moniker of “IRL” can be seen as a form of “digital dualism” (Jurgenson 2012) that creates divisions between digital and physical worlds, but “Black in real life,” which I later abbreviated “BLK IRL,” became my shorthand for speaking to the ways in which online content is informed by offline contexts. Last summer, as social unrest took over the United States yet again, I began to think about how Black people, and all people, really, navigate multiple worlds synchronously on a daily basis. Given my work with Black social media influencers and other members of the “creative class” I wondered how much their ways of life were impacted not just by the COVID-19 global pandemic but also the social pressures related to being Black public figures during multiple pandemics. Ultimately, I wanted to understand how their self-expressions ebbed and flowed throughout the worlds they lived in. Through this reframing, “IRL” for me became more akin to “AFK,” or “away from keyboard.” By that, I mean there is no longer an assumption of two isolated “selves” (e.g., an online self and an offline self) but rather one “self” that navigates multiple real worlds, or real lives, at the same time.
These thoughts eventually evolved and inspired me to develop The BLK IRL Podcast to chronicle how the increased public calls from followers for social justice advocacy during the first months of the COVID-19 global pandemic impacted the ways that laborers in the “creative economy,” including influencers, writers, and marketers, address (and are seen by) their audiences. Admittedly, there was never a debate in my mind to consider other mediums to tell this story. I have been a longtime fan of podcasting and audio as a medium for storytelling. I have always understood the power of hearing people tell their own stories to such an extent that I prefer to listen to audiobooks of memoirs rather than read them. At times, the written word can, for me, fall short of conveying the fullness of human expression. Elements like tone, pitch, and pacing make a difference in how I receive a story.
It is safe to say that we are experiencing a cultural audio renaissance. There is a buzz around audio now that is generating a new level of excitement culturally that I argue we haven’t experienced since the launch of the Serial podcast by the producers of This American Life in 2014. Serial, as you may recall, became regarded as an “audio game-changer” and was the first podcast to win a Peabody award. The popularity of Serial, or what has been called the “Serial effect” catalyzed a significant increase in podcast creation and consumption across the board. In the new “renaissance” that I am referring to, audio has gone from a product that can be consumed in isolation (i.e., podcast) to a product that can be scaled to be concurrently experienced and cocreated with others. This renaissance has been referred to as the “social audio” era. In the past year, for example, we have not only witnessed the rise of the live audio application Clubhouse but also announcements from larger platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, and Slack (to name a few) about their ongoing attempts and projected plans to participate in the “social audio” space.
These developments make the consideration of audio, especially podcasting, as a medium for scholarship that much more pertinent. Conducting an interview for a podcast is not the same as recording an interview for fieldwork. To be clear, there are many podcast formats that do not feature interviews, but for the purposes of this essay, I will be focusing on positioning the “podcast interview” as a specialized genre of interviewing that is constructed by certain cultural constraints. Recording an interview for the purpose of releasing parts of it as a “podcast” differs greatly from recording an interview for the purpose of data collection. In podcasting projects, producers (yes, including “scholars”) must simultaneously balance the dual goals of producing knowledge to both inform and entertain if they want their work to reach a popular audience. This hybridizing nature of podcasting is sometimes referred to as “edutainment.” For this reason, podcasts are an ideal format for public scholarship because they can serve as a point of convergence for academic life and civil life.
My work towards developing The BLK IRL Podcast was largely informed by my experience working in the marketing industry before leaving to pursue my PhD. I thought about it just as much, if not more, from the lens of a marketer than the lens of a scholar. Even Briggs (2007, 552) acknowledges interviewing as a “key point of convergence between anthropologists and marketing and media consultants, reporters, writers, NGOs, and nonprofessionals in many countries, including the United States.” One of the first activities in my production process was to create a “podcast landscape analysis” for myself, which involved studying the different categories of podcasts that exist in the public sphere to determine where my podcast would fit in among the thousands of podcasts that are available on platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
As Peters and Eatman (2014) note, “at its best public scholarship includes the study of culture.” I had to study the culture of podcasting to be better able to position my project in an already crowded marketplace. Marketing is a part of knowledge production that scholars often hate thinking about or discussing, from my observations. Perhaps this is due in part to a culture, at least in more liberal institutions, that is predicated on an intellectual rejection of capitalism and an intellectual promotion of leftist ideology. This may create an internal conflict for scholars who both want to resist capitalist systems, on principle, but also have no choice but to be complicit in them and participate in them as laborers within the university system. Additionally, departments may also not be equipped to train students to become “public intellectuals” in a digital era because perhaps professors themselves are still struggling with how to adapt to the increasing pressures to be more “social” and “public-facing” online. Again, these are all my own observations. While the explanations for the resistance towards acknowledging the imposition of self-promotion and marketing to scholarship are plenty, I believe that it is of increasing importance not just within our industry (academia is a business, after all), but in the capitalist society that we all live in (whether or not we want it to exist).
What does it mean to conduct interviews in the context of an “interview society” like the United States, where interviewing practices are ubiquitous (Briggs 1986; Koven 2014)? Briggs (1986) reflected on how his beliefs about interviewing often differed from his participants’ understandings of interviewing, which led him to think more about the various forms of interview encounters that exist as well as the competing demands on interviewers and interviewees. My experiences differed from his in that the people I interviewed for the first season of BLK IRL were public figures such as social media influencers, writers, actors, scholars, and marketers. They were not only familiar with the interview as a form of asymmetric interaction, where one party (the interviewer) asks questions and another party (the interviewee) answers them (Koven 2014), but all of my guests had previous experiences as interviewers or interviewees prior to our podcast recording. In fact, given the professional identities of my podcast guests, as well as my own professional background in both marketing and academia, my work in season one is best positioned as an example of “studying-sideways” because my guests and I essentially occupy the same social spaces (Ortner 2010).
Ortner (2010) highlights the ways that shared worlds of knowledge between researcher/interviewer and interlocutor/interviewee can become a basis for genuine cooperation. In addition to our shared professional worlds of knowledge, I would be remiss if I did not also discuss how race and gender informed the production of The BLK IRL Podcast. With respect to gender, what stands out from the first season of my podcast is that only one of my guests identifies as male and all other guests identify as female. This is a subject that I brought up in a few conversations because despite me reaching out to people of all identities, I had great difficulty booking male-identifying guests for the season. I cannot exactly determine why this was, but I also do consider the fact that “influencing” as an industry has been traditionally raced and gendered as white and female (Duffy 2017). Additionally, there are people who rather not associate themselves with the label of “influencer,” opting instead to position themselves as “content creator” or “artist.” However, these are all inferences that may not fully explain my initial trouble in booking guests. Another reason could be that I was pitching people to participate in a completely new podcast by a person they didn’t know during a period of time when they may have, as Black public figures, been already inundated with similar media requests. For people like many of those that I reached out to, taking time to participate in an unpaid opportunity that may not advance their career in a meaningful way is risky. When your “everyday life” is your full-time job, there is more pressure for every minute to make cents.
Despite the fact that I was not able to conduct my interviews in person due to COVID-19, I felt that I was still able to create a “participatory culture” by conducting my interviews on Zoom, where my guests could still feed off my body language and physical presence. For example, several guests commented positively on my appearance, particularly on the fact that I sport a fully shaven head. I think the fact that the conversations were recorded as visual interviews made them sound more like “authentic” one-on-one conversations instead of “pre-planned interrogations,” as some scholars have described the traditional fieldwork interview (Macdonald 2010; Okely 2015).
I did not have previous relationships with any of the guests I booked for season one. I emailed each person “cold,” providing information about myself, my project, and my intentions. One thing that I think may have served me well, but I have not officially confirmed this with any of my guests, is how easily searchable I am online. Since I already have an online presence, which includes a personal website and public social media accounts, it is easy to research me and get an idea of who I am and/or what I represent before responding to my emails. Admittedly, it was hard to book guests without any previous personal connections to them, so I can only assume that those who said “yes” found some personal connection to me or the intentions behind my work. Overall, I felt that my podcast interviews were enhanced, in part, because of the ways that different aspects of my identity like my ethnicity, gender, or professional experience became relevant or obscured at different points of the conversation. For example, in my conversation in Season 1, Episode 5 with social media influencer Sofiyat Ibrahim (@The_Odditty), our shared Nigerian heritage led to a rich conversation about accents and language towards the end of our time. Although this was not part of the line of questioning I had prepared for our interview, it became a central focus of the episode during my editing process, which in itself is another way podcasts are distinct from general audio recordings.
Editing is a part of podcast production and scholarship that often doesn’t get discussed openly. I recognize that I previously positioned my project as a form of “studying sideways,” suggesting an equal balance of power between myself and my collaborators. However, as the editor of the end product, I do not have any illusions of this project as a solely objective undertaking. All forms of knowledge production are subjective to varying degrees. With podcasting, specifically, I had to consider how much to alter or manipulate the natural ways that people talk for the sake of my potential audience’s listening experience. I had to make conscious choices based largely on my own aesthetic preferences and my beliefs of what would best appeal to a popular audience. I did not choose to cut parts of my interviews, opting instead to release the conversations primarily in full, as they were recorded.
I did, however, make smaller aesthetic choices, like cutting some of the long pauses between sentences or “umms” for the sake of the listener. Whereas a recorded conversation during fieldwork may never be listened to by anyone besides the researcher, I was very conscious of the fact that my interviews for the podcast would be heard by many other people, including the guests themselves. This speaks to the additional pressures that researchers can face in producing public scholarship. Editing episodes of the podcast also meant that I had to listen to myself speak ad nauseum. I’m sure that I am not the only person that cringes at the sound of their own recorded voice. That said, none of this deters me from wanting to make my research accessible to the public through audio, but it is important to consider given the rising popularity and use of the medium.
My interviews for the podcast were semi-structured in that I came prepared with questions to ask while also allowing the conversations to naturally take detours, as appropriate, within the allotted time. It is also important to emphasize that my guests are public figures who are all easy to find online, which in a way made my preparation process easier, but also made me conscious of learning too much about them before our conversations. However, this allowed me to ensure that I didn’t ask them too many questions that they would have answered in other mediums so that our conversation would feel “fresh.” I find the semi-structured interview to be a more compelling interview format that flies in the face of the ways that fieldwork can be, as Macdonald (2010) writes, “reduced to pre-planned interrogation, where diversion and innovation are forbidden as unethical.”
I made the decision to limit my conversations to no more than forty minutes. There were multiple reasons for this. One reason was that I wanted each episode of the podcast to be less than sixty minutes total. Here is another instance where my personal aesthetic preferences informed my end product. It is personally hard for me to stay engaged with podcasts that are longer than one hour. I do not always have the attention span or time, no matter how interested I may be in the subject matter. The other reason is that I did not want to cut too much of my recorded interviews to achieve this episode length. The way that I chose to format each episode is that the interviews would carry the majority of the episode and then each episode would close with a segment where I would call out points of the conversation that stood out to me and try to connect those points to various disciplines of scholarship.
As a multimodal anthropologist, I take an interdisciplinary approach to research that I feel greatly enhances my work. Despite my confidence in this approach, I often feel trapped by the hegemony in academia because various aspects of who I am and what I study conflict with what is usually valued in the social sciences or humanities. However, I continue to work on projects outside my coursework that affirm the kinds of work that I want to exist in the world. I don’t only want to theorize about things; I want to practice them too. I wholly believe that BLK IRL, as an interdisciplinary project that I am producing during the course of my doctoral training, is just as significant as my dissertation project—or any work that I produce after I am able to call myself a “doctor” of anthropology—will be. Learning is an ongoing process. What we learn outside the classroom is often more pivotal or affirming than what we learn in the classroom, especially at the doctoral level, where so much of our time is spent in isolation. Since I study an industry that many people engage with on an everyday basis (influencer marketing), it is important to me that my work is accessible and legible to people outside of academic settings. As digital media evolves the work of scholarship and what it looks like (or sounds like) to be a scholar, podcasting offers us a way to reach a wider audience by experimenting with “the interview” as the work instead of just the method.
To hear more from Anuli Akanegbu about her work and THE BLK IRL Podcast, check out season 3, episode 1 of Anthropological Airwaves.
REFERENCES CITED
Akanegbu, Anuli. 2020. “Season 01, Episode 05: Get in Loser, We’re Going Viral.” The BLK IRL Podcast. https://www.blkirl.com/episodes/getinloserweregoingviral
Briggs, Charles L. 1986. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Briggs, Charles L. 2007. “Anthropology, Interviewing, and Communicability in Contemporary Society.” Current Anthropology 48 (4): 551–80.
Carmen, Ashley. 2021. “Clubhouse Defined a Format—Now It Has to Defend It.” The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/22362980/clubhouse-social-audio-facebook-twitter-android.
Duffy, Brooke Erin. 2017. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Jurgenson, Nathan. 2012. “The IRL Fetish.” The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com/the-irl-fetish/.
Koven, Michèle. 2014. “Interviewing: Practice, Ideology, Genre, and Intertextuality.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43:499–520.
Macdonald, Sharon. 2010. “Making Ethics.” In Ethnographic Practice in the Present, edited by Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell, and Helena Wuff, 80–94. Oxford: Berghahn.
Okely, Judith. 2015. “Dialogues with Anthropologists: Where Interviews become Relevant.” In Extraordinary Encounters: Authenticity and the Interview, edited by Katherine Smith, James Staples, and Nigel Rapport, 128–56. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Ortner, Sherry B. 2010. “Access: Reflections on Studying up in Hollywood.” Ethnography 11 (2): 211–33.
Peters, Scott J., and Timothy K. Eatman. 2014. “Afterword: Speaking and Working in Critically Hopeful Terms.” In Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life, edited by David D. Cooper, Julie Ellison, Scott J. Peters, and Timothy K. Eatman, 167–78. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.