Hello Podcasters and Potential Podcasters,
My name is Justin Myrick and I have just recently joined the SfAA Podcast team. I want to tell you a little about the podcast project, and what the this project means to me and ultimately what it provides for students, professors, researchers and practitioners in any field who see the potential for their work to be put into “action.”
Quickly, this project is a student ran effort to record and digitize selected speakers at the SfAA conferences annual meetings. The team then posts the sessions as mp3s on the internet at our website (www.sfaapodcasts.net) absolutely for free to the public. People (anyone) can download the podcasts and get rich material on current research and hear about exciting applied approaches to doing anthropology and other multi and interdisciplinary work. More information can be found by exploring our website.
I am going to explain the importance of this podcast project by telling you how I came across the project and the reasons that lead me to look for such a thing. It was late one night, I had done a lot of reading and I was thinking of how could I get my anthropological literature on audio so that I could listen to it during my commute on the train. Then I was thinking, “I wonder if there is any supplemental material on the internet…say an anthropology podstcast of some kind? And how interesting and useful that could be. So I began searching several keywords trying to find anthropology podcasts, and I found very few—mostly AAA news podcasts and the like. Then I came across the SfAA Podcast website and there was a blog posted titled “How are you using the podcasts?” And I thought, how great is this, here are people who are spearheading a project, recording professionals speaking at conferences and they are asking feedback from their listeners trying to make this podcast the most effective tool and resource it could be. And that is what it is, a really good, easy access, easily consumed resource. This is a great resource for students who are uncertain about career goals, about research opportunities and most importantly about the value of applied approaches in the sciences, especially anthropology. This podcast project makes it easy for those who cannot attend academic conferences to get an idea about applied anthropology and to hear from speakers who are talking about their work doing applied anthropology, showing the broad range of possibilities in the field.
The SfAA Podcast project is among those at the forefront in the trend to creatively expand academic resources and it is through people who are creatively thinking about how to make those resources widely and easily available that creative people like you can use these resources productively. I am sure that in the future will be seeing the use of podcasting throughout the disciplines to provide even more democratically available resource. And another note about its usefulness, for those of you who are the subjects and topics of many research projects, this is a direct way to review those projects you participated in, and now you have an archive online which you can review and quite possibly make that project or another more democratic, I mean participating directly in the research, with your own questions—I am referring to participatory research and action research.
Take care and I hope to hear from you about any comments or ideas for our little podcast project here, Ooh, and spread the word about us, we’re free!
Justin Myrick
P.S. This is a relatively new project, and if you access the archives you will notice that the sound quality of the podcasts is not the greatest. Well, now the SfAA Podcasts are fully sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at UNT, so we got more money because of the potential recognized in this project and the sound quality will improve immensely this year—in other words, don’t worry it’ll sound good. So, help support us and subscribe through itunes or click on the RSS button on our site.
