Academia for the Masses: Midd Sociology Launches Podcast

Images have largely replaced sound in today’s media. In fact, we are so used to pictures accompanying sound that it’s strange just to listen to a story and to let our imaginations take over in creating mental pictures. It’s even stranger when we consider this within an academic context.

Yet, that is what the Sociology Department is doing. Working with Erin Davis, a documentary filmmaker and radio producer, a group of senior sociology majors are translating their 80-page senior theses into five-minute podcasts.

Davis previously taught the J-term course “Sound and Story,” where students learned the techniques of radio production and produced their own stories through sound. The J-term course offered students an alternative to academic writing. The class generated student interest in translating senior work into more accessible forms. After conversations between interested students, Davis, and the sociology department, the project was conceived in the fall of this academic year.

It’s the marrying of two seemingly disparate concepts: mass journalism and academia, but a development that Sociology Department Chair Linus Owens sees to be important. Although a journalist and a sociologist may approach events differently, with the sociologist asking questions about the underlying socioeconomic structures at the root of events that the journalist may oversee, the relationship between the two is not too far removed.

“Both sociology and journalism are getting at a similar question, which is how to explain the world and how to put it in a meaningful context that people can understand and do something with,” Owens said. By putting sociological research into journalism, in-depth research on a social phenomenon can be conveyed to a much wider audience.

Unlike sociological research, journalism is not comprised of pages of research, analysis, and graphs. Rather, journalism appeals to the short attention span of most readers.

“When you do research, it only matters that you care,” Davis said. “When you’re working on the podcasts, you have to ask yourself why anyone else cares about it, or figure out how to make them care.”

In a departure from the academic mindset, students have to think about translating their work into a story that listeners will be able to connect with on a much more personal level.

“Because who’s going to read your 50-page essay, right?” Owens chuckled.

Because the five-minute podcasts cannot cover the entirety of the research and writing that has gone into a student’s senior work, students have to think about smaller things to extract. These things might be a point of interest that came up at some point during research but that the student didn’t have the time to pursue. Or the student might look for a smaller story that will point to the research as a larger whole.

One of the students involved in the project, Rosalie Wright-Lapin ’15, is still looking for the perfect way to translate her research into a podcast.

Wright-Lapin’s thesis is about how socioeconomic status, family background, and notions of academic achievement play into social groups and identities at Middlebury Union High School. In piecing together her senior thesis, Wright-Lapin conducted and recorded one-on-one interviews with teachers, administrators, counselors, and students. In addition, she conducted semi-structured class discussion that varied in academic level to look at student participation, which she noted with observations.

Due to the type of research Wright-Lapin conducted and the nature of her study, Davis recommended that she pursue the narrative approach.

“It would be a more vivid image rather than just analytical research,” Wright-Lapin said of focusing on one story in her podcast. “It’s an opportunity to portray my work in a different medium and a push to think of my work in a different way.”

Narrative is not the only approach to creating podcasts. According to Davis, another common, more traditional approach is having the student act as the host and presents his or her story. However, she also stressed that there were more than these two options available to students.

The students involved in this project are working closely with Davis to put their podcasts together. At this point in the semester, the projects are still in early production stages but scheduled to be completed in May.

Although the major aim of this project is to make sociological research more accessible to the larger public, the department hopes this pilot project will also open up fresh alternatives to traditional senior work. The sociology department is the first to have embarked on any such project at the College and has raised some important questions on the accessibility and applicability of academic research to the general public.

In the academic grindstone that is Middlebury, it could be worthwhile to take the time to stop and think about why others should care about our work as much as we do.