In this week's episode, guest expert Hannah McGregor, Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University in Canada, joins us to talk about podcasting, public engagement, Harry Potter, and feminism. We wrap up with our best tips and advice for public engagement in higher ed and at the end we'll have an assignment for our listeners- we challenge you to pitch yourself as a guest on one of your favorite podcasts. Let us know how it goes and share your story on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and tag us @university_of_venus on IG and @UVenus on Twitter or post it on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/ and we will share, retweet, and amplify! Find University of Venus on Instagram @university_of_venus , Twitter @UVenus , and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/
Topics Discussed in this Episode:
Resources Discussed in this Episode:
Music Credits: Magic by Six Umbrellas
Sound Engineer: Ernesto Valencia
View from Venus Episode 6
Mary Churchill: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the View from Venus. My name is Mary Churchill, and on today's episode, I am joined by co-hosts Meg Palladino and Lee Skallerup Bessette and guest expert, Hannah McGregor, Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
[00:00:27] In today's episode, we'll be talking with Hannah about podcasting women's magazines, Harry Potter and feminism. You will walk away with our best tips and advice for public engagement and podcasting and at the end we'll have an assignment for you. Thank you for joining us. Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research and teaching focuses on the links between publishing and social change, along with her colleague, Marcelle Kosman, Hannah created Witch, Please, a podcast about the Harry Potter world.
[00:01:01] In 2017 Hannah started Secret Feminist Agenda, a peer reviewed podcast, and collaboration with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. We asked Hannah to join us on View from Venus because we wanted to talk with her about gender and public engagement. Welcome, Hannah, and thank you for joining us.
[00:01:23] Hannah McGregor: [00:01:23] Thank you so much for inviting me. I am delighted to be looking at all of your lovely faces through zoom.
[00:01:30] Meg Palladino: [00:01:30] So Hannah, we like to start each episode with a lighthearted pop question to get us laughing. And my question today is, if you could have a year's supply of anything, what would it be?
[00:01:40] Hannah McGregor: [00:01:40] My immediate answer is so unbelievably banal. Are you ready?
[00:01:44] Meg Palladino: [00:01:44] Mine's banal too. What is it?
[00:01:45] Hannah McGregor: [00:01:45] I mean, it's so bad. It's cat food. Cause here's the thing, I am really bad at errands. Like I fall behind on laundry all the time. I mean, there's never any food in my fridge. Like I'm miserably bad at remembering. I'm like groceries again, but I just did them three days ago.
[00:02:07] How dare you, but it's fine. If I run out of food, that's fine. I can solve that problem if I run out of cat food. The whole house is in disarray like nobody's sleeping properly tonight. Probably I'll get eaten the second I turn my back on them and so if that could just be taken care of, I feel like the rest of my life would, would be just fine.
[00:02:32] Meg Palladino: [00:02:32] Very good answer.
[00:02:34] Mary Churchill: [00:02:34] Meg, what's yours?
[00:02:35] Mine is, I would like a year's supply of lip balm. Because I always want lip balm and I always lose it, or, you know, it runs out, or my son eats it, or something happens. And you know, if I just had a big stockpile of it, nice. You know, Burt's bees lip balm, I'd be super happy.
[00:02:53] Hannah McGregor: [00:02:53] Just one in every pocket.
[00:02:54] Mary Churchill: [00:02:54] Mine would be red wine and chocolate. Mine would be two. With a year's supply of red wine and chocolate. I think like I would have to worry about nothing else in life.
[00:03:11] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:03:11] So you see that's a good one and I should steal it, but I'm going to go with my like first gut thing that came into my head again, which was seltzer. Like, I just need my, yeah, I just seen my year supply of seltzer and like when I mean year supply, I actually mean 10 years supply. Cause that's probably how much I go through in a year.
[00:03:29] So one of the reasons, I suggested you as a guest for this show because I have long admired the work that you're doing with your podcasting. And what that means for public engagement and particularly what that means for public engagement for us as women. I wonder if you could go into a little bit of the pros and cons of podcasting as a form of public engagement and what this means specifically for women, how is it different for us?
[00:03:55] Hannah McGregor: [00:03:55] Yeah, absolutely. So, podcasting, like many other forms of sort of DIY media, has historically been dominated by men. And there is a reason for that. And that is that people, there's a lot of politics of the voice surrounding all audio forms, radio, podcasting, audio books. There's a lot of expectations about what a listenable voice sounds like and women's voices tend to be policed in ways that men's voices are not. The best example I have of this is an episode of This American Life called, I believe, If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS, which is about internet trolling. And they talk right in the opening., Ira Glass talks about how the number one form of sort of complaint mail that they get on This American Life is complaints about the sounds of the voices of their young women producers. People do not like the sound of women's voices, especially young women's voices. So, there's your big con is that chances are if you become a woman who speaks a lot publicly in a venue like podcasting, people are going to let you know at some point that they hate the sound of your voice.
[00:05:13] So that's fun. However, as the hosts, I believe Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu, who are the hosts behind the now defunct Buzzfeed podcast, Another Round, once said that podcasting is also one of the safest spaces to be a woman doing public work because if people hate you, they just won't listen.
[00:05:40] They're just like, they would have to hate listen to you talking for an hour. And people who hate women don't want to listen to us talk for an hour and so you end up already sort of just beautifully like filtering out the people who would resent the kind of stuff you had to say upfront because they don't want to listen to your voice.
[00:05:58] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:05:58] Yeah. And I think that that's a big difference between blogging - because I've been drawing these parallels between sort of the, the rise in academic blogs about a decade ago and now this rise in podcasts where a hate read is so much easier because they don't even read it.
[00:06:14] They click on it, read the first sentence and then like, you're wrong. I hate you. You know,
[00:06:19] Hannah McGregor: [00:06:19] You can hate read. You can hate skim. You can set up Google alerts for words that make you angry. Yeah. You can't do that with a podcast.
[00:06:27] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:06:27] No, exactly. No, that's a, that's a really good point. Yeah.
[00:06:32] Mary Churchill: [00:06:32] I love the fact that you speak about women's voices. So, I read this book and I'm going to, I might slaughter her name, but Kristen Meinzer, So You Want to Start a Podcast. I just saw it at Harvard Bookstore and I'm like, hey and it was cheap and I'm like, I'm going to get this. But she talks about, her voice, how much her voice has driven people crazy and how she's gotten hate mail and hate comments about her voice, and she's kind of stuck with it and said, this is part of my identity.
[00:06:59] This is who I am. I'm not going to change who I am because it annoys you. Just don't listen to me, right?
[00:07:04] And so, yeah, I do think there is a, this space is a better space in some ways for women because you're right, just don't listen to us. Right?
[00:07:14] Hannah McGregor: [00:07:14] Yeah. Also, while there is absolutely still policing of women's voices and that kind of, you know, unpleasant gendered response to women's voices, a lot of the time, the expectations around vocal style and podcasts are really different.
[00:07:27] It's an, it's a more informal medium than radio. So, while on radio, you're still really expected to have this radio voice, which has a particular kind of modulation. Podcasts, we have a lot of tolerance for informal speech, for vocal fry, for uptalk, for more audible accents, to dialect, slang. It is this informal audio space, which automatically makes it more inclusive and means that it's okay if people just talk the way they talk.
[00:07:57] Mary Churchill: [00:07:57] I love that.
[00:07:57] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:07:57] There's also something to be said about it at being, certainly radio has to be broadly appealing, whereas podcasts, we can be very niche.
[00:08:07] Hannah McGregor: [00:08:07] Yeah, and I mean, we have to, like, there's a lot of important questions around why white male voices are the broadly appealing voices and women's voices are the niche voices, but it is absolutely the case that radio is broadcasting and podcasts are narrow casting. And so, it is fine if a bunch of the people who listen to public radio would hate your podcast because you're not making public radio.
[00:08:33] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:08:33] No, exactly.
[00:08:34] Hannah McGregor: [00:08:34] Yeah.
[00:08:36] Mary Churchill: [00:08:36] Oh, I love it. I love it. And this podcasting thing is all new for me and I am loving it so much, and I, you're reinforcing why I'm loving it as this., t's a great space.
[00:08:46] So switching gears, because this was a question I really wanted to ask. When I read your bio, I'm like, Ooh, middlebrow magazines. That is so exciting. So, I am fascinated by the fact that you're, you're into this as well. And so really kind of the role of middlebrow magazines in shaping women's culture and I think specifically in Canada? Say something about that.
[00:09:13] Hannah McGregor: [00:09:13] Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, middlebrow magazines were, in the early 20th century, one of the really formative publics for women writers, women thinkers, and there's a variety of reasons for that, including how deeply gendered, the sort of sentimental mode was.
[00:09:31] So, like, that was one of the ways that women artists were allowed to be making art was be making sentimental art. And that's what middlebrow magazines published. And so, it did become the space where, where women writers could get a start and where a lot of well-known early Canadian women writers did get their start publishing in magazines, and that's continued to be, I mean, look at Alice Munro, right?
[00:09:55] Like one of the most significant writers in the history of 20th century Canadian fiction is a magazine writer for the most part. We tend to disparage magazine writing as less serious than book writing, but that's where, that's where Monroe published most of her work. You know, the other interesting thing and what I've always found appealing about looking at middlebrow magazines is that they, they walk this liminal space between the artistic and the commercial and that's, for a variety of reasons, including the way in the 20th century, women started to become primarily responsible for making household purchases. And so, the sort of like rise of consumer capitalism in the 20th century was very oriented towards women as the people making the purchasing decisions and fiction was a way to draw readers in so that they would look at the ads.
[00:10:50] It was a way to advertise an aspirational lifestyle, both through the stories you told and through the kinds of glossy advertisements that would accompany them. And they are like, that is the great pleasure of looking at a middlebrow magazine today is the ads, which are just fascinating texts. They are fun.
[00:11:10] Students always love them. I always love looking at them. They're just interesting. Like the whole magazines are just these interesting, noisy, weird spaces that hold so much delight while also, they were doing a huge amount of political work. So, there's also lots and lots of stuff to unpack there.
[00:11:29] Mary Churchill: [00:11:29] Yeah. It's class making, right? Or class maintaining, right? I mean, I grew up in a working-class household. We, the only magazines we had were things like Field and Stream or something that my father would get. And I remember going to the doctor or the dentist and that's where I would read these, Better Homes and Gardens or whatever, right? And they were, to me, they were like, wow, what is that world? Whose houses are those? Who eats like that? Because I had no access to that. So, it was wild to see those magazines, even just the ads was right like this other world of photos from people's lives.
[00:12:06] Hannah McGregor: [00:12:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Their class making the race, making their empire building, right. They're involved in all of that kind of work. I mean, they're gender making too, right? They're inventing what it means to be a woman. Now that I work in a publishing program and have colleagues who work in magazines or have worked in magazines, it's also interesting to hear how from the business perspective, you are deliberately building an aspirational environment. So, the lifestyle that is advertised in magazines is deliberately more expensive than the target demographic of the magazine, not so much more expensive that it feels alienating, just enough more expensive that it feels aspirational and exciting.
[00:12:51] Mary Churchill: [00:12:51] Wow. Wow.
[00:12:52] Meg Palladino: [00:12:52] You have a podcast called Witch, Please, a podcast about the Harry Potter world. Why this podcast and what did you discover in making the podcast?
[00:13:01] Hannah McGregor: [00:13:01] Yeah, so, Marcelle Kosman, my co-host on Witch, Please, it was her idea to start the podcast. We started it in 2015. I was a postdoc at the time at the University of Alberta.
[00:13:15] She was working on her PhD and it started off with a desire to reread the Harry Potter books. We just were talking about how much we missed reading for fun, and we were like, wouldn't it be wacky if we just re-read all of the books and talked about them? And then a friend of ours, Neil, who ended up actually being around and Marcelle had a little experience in campus radio.
[00:13:32] So we were like, oh, what the heck, let's just record our conversations. This will be entertaining. We were like, we would like to talk to one another about this thing. Why don't we record it? I guess we can share it with people. And what I ended up learning through the process of making Witch, Please, primarily is that there is an appetite for conversations that use scholarly tool sets in a way that can resonate with wider listeners. By which I mean, people were excited that we were talking about Harry Potter and they were excited by how the podcast modeled that things like feminist scholarship, critical race theory, narrative theory could actually show them things about the books that they loved, that they had never seen before.
[00:14:24] And they were excited for those conversations. You know, they wanted to come along with us on those conversations. And so that was a real revelatory experience for me because I had really been kind of taught that like nobody would be interested in the work that I did unless they were a specialist in the same area as me.
[00:14:42] And then here I was making this podcast where I was like, let me just quickly explain Foucault to you and like listeners would write to me and be like, okay, well I guess I should read some Foucault, where should I start? It's like,
[00:14:53] Mary Churchill: [00:14:53] That is so cool.
[00:14:55] Hannah McGregor: [00:14:55] Yeah. So, I was like, Oh, okay. We are wrong. Like we're just all collectively wrong about the degree to which there is a public interest in our work.
[00:15:03] Okay. I believe that to be true. Now starting from that belief, you know, how do I move forward. And that's really reshaped the way I do basically all of my work.
[00:15:12] Mary Churchill: [00:15:12] Very cool and fun. And fun to reread, right? Like reading in public is fun. Reading in a group is fun and then talking about it and getting all meta about what you're doing, but I love kind of demystifying Foucault and making it relevant for people's everyday lives in a text that so many people enjoy.
[00:15:31] Hannah McGregor: [00:15:31] Yeah, absolutely. I think sometimes of the podcasts that I do as like remediating my favorite bits of academic sort of socialization and knowledge exchange. So you know, the Witch, Please in a lot of ways is just like a grad seminar going really well, like we have talked about the same book and now we are going to sit down and we're going to talk through it out loud and it's the pleasure and excitement of those conversations that build collaboratively when you sit down over a book and unpack it together.
[00:16:03] And then Secret Feminist Agenda, my new podcast, feels to me like nothing so much as like a really good bar conversation at the end of the day of the conference.
[00:16:13] Mary Churchill: [00:16:13] Awesome.
[00:16:14] Hannah McGregor: [00:16:14] Which is where the good stuff happens. We sit through the panels because we, for some reason have all collectively decided we have to do that, but we're all just holding out for the chance to sit down with a really interesting person and be like, let's talk about stuff.
[00:16:29] Mary Churchill: [00:16:29] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:16:31] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:16:31] Well, I think one of the reasons that I, and this is what's so interesting about it, is because we have no way to measure and reward the hallway conversations, right? Like we need the, we need the line on our CV and we need the, those sort of formal presentations and we'd like audiences and we support each other in that kind of way.
[00:16:50] But it's really interesting how podcasting has become that, but it has also presented us with a way to quote, unquote, legitimize those conversations and the work that's taking place in a lot of ways, and, I mean, one of the things is, is your new podcast is open peer reviewed. It is breaking new ground in terms of what we legitimize in higher education as quote unquote counting. And so, I wanted you to talk maybe a little bit about the process.
[00:17:19] Hannah McGregor: [00:17:19] Yeah. Yeah. That's been really interesting. So, a Secret Feminist Agenda has gone through an experimental peer review process with Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and it was extremely experimental.
[00:17:31] It was, the whole process was funded by a SSHRC grant that we got to sort of pilot exactly this. The peer review becomes a way, both to legitimize it, to point at the sort of public scholarship and say, this counts. This is real scholarship. But it's also, I think, an opportunity for us to also rethink peer review itself and to say, okay, if we care about publicly engaged, accessible, open scholarship, we might need to reinvent how we do peer review and so we also need to look at that and say, okay, is this still valuable? We think so. We think there's a lot to be gained from peer review, from the actual responses that you get. So how can we rethink the approaches that are available to us so that peer review can keep up with the transforming forms that scholarship takes?
[00:18:20] Mary Churchill: [00:18:20] So we are running out of time, so I want to wrap up and have us all share top tips for public engagement. I can start. I think that early on in our conversation we talked about podcasting as a different kind of space for women, and I do think what I have noticed right away is. We don't have this direct engagement with the haters and the trolls.
[00:18:47] Our blog at Inside Higher Ed often attracts what I call anti women commenters, and they can be other women as well, but they will read, say, our title or first line or the tagline and attack it. So, they're using it as a space, as a platform to really go after women. And so, this podcast feels like it's more for me, it feels like it's more of our space that we can actually have this space and if people want to listen to it, great. If they don't, but it feels safer because it doesn't feel like it's open for attack. So, to me, I really like this form of public engagement, and so I would tell women, my tip is do it. Start a podcast, go on a podcast, pitch yourself to someone to be interviewed on a podcast. Just do it. So that's my top tip.
[00:19:41] I think mine would be like, be brave and don't read the comments.
[00:19:48] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:19:48] Evergreen hashtag evergreen. I think that the choose something that you're really knowledgeable and passionate about and so that would be my advice is pick something that you, that you're really passionate or curious.
[00:20:02] About and pick people that, that you really enjoy hanging out with to do it because I think that shines through.
[00:20:09] Hannah McGregor: [00:20:09] Yeah, absolutely. Oh God, so many, but I'm gonna say, I hear from a lot of women, academics are sort of like, well, how could I possibly have anything to say, right? Like, I think it feels vulnerable and scary and what I would like to remind people of is that the skill set of making a podcast and the skillset of teaching a class are remarkably similar. You're engaging an audience of people who are not necessarily specialists, but who are intelligent and engaged and present. And it's your job to figure out how to mobilize and put to work the ideas and the knowledge and the expertise that you have in a way that draws that audience into the conversation and makes them feel like they are part of something that is really exciting, and that's what we're doing in the classroom. And if you can do it in the classroom, you can do it on a podcast.
[00:21:03] Mary Churchill: [00:21:03] Okay. Listeners, here's this week's assignment. Pitch yourself as a guest on a podcast that you listen to and tell us how it goes. Share your story on IG, Twitter, or Facebook, and tag us at UVenus and we'll retweet, share it in our story and post on Facebook.
[00:21:19] As always, thank you for joining us, and we'll be back next week with Leslie Wang talking about how to set boundaries and prevent burnout in academia.