Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the experience of co-producing an anthropological podcast, this paper explores the discursive, affective, and analytical limits of traditional academic genres of speech, and the anthropological affordances of other genres that convene broader publics—along with how to foster them.

Paper long abstract:

Michel Foucault is reputed to have told a friend once that, out of necessity, ten percent of what he wrote was deliberately incomprehensible, lest the French intelligentsia fail to take him seriously. By the same token, he and his ideas achieved wide public circulation and influence. While we cannot doubt the value of his work (or of reading intricate theoretical work in general) the apocryphal anecdote raises underexamined questions.

On one hand, we must ask: what are the discursive, affective, and analytical limits of traditional academic genres of speech and writing? What anthropological insights cannot be spoken during a seminar, or a conference panel? What ethnographic insights are worth sharing that might remain inadmissible, or even illegible, in circuits of peer-reviewed publication? What keeps our ideas from moving beyond those circuits? And so on.

And on the other hand: what are the anthropological affordances of other genres of speech that speak to broader publics, and how can these be cultivated? What valuable analytical work, for example, does a podcast enable—with its capacity for integrating anecdote, interdisciplinarity, big-picture speculation, critical reflection, and so on? And how might that analytic work be enriched by the affective possibilities of a medium which facilitates humour, personal engagement, and (dare we say) fun—not to mention a permissive context in which to invite the voices of our ethnographic interlocutors?

This paper explores these questions on the basis of the author’s experience of public scholarship—particularly, co-producing the podcast Conversations in Anthropology for four years.