Explaining your research to someone who isn’t already in the conversation is one of the most useful things you can do. The jargon falls away. The assumed knowledge disappears. And you find out quickly whether there’s an actual argument underneath—or whether the prose has been doing the work for you.
Academic writing rewards completeness: every claim hedged, every exception noted, the full apparatus of citation and qualification. That’s appropriate for a journal article. But it also makes it easy to avoid the simpler, harder question: what is this actually about?
A podcast episode forces an answer. You have fifteen minutes, a listener who has other things to do, and no footnotes to hide behind. That constraint is generative. Researchers who find podcasting most useful often say the same thing: they understood their argument better after recording than they did before.
There are people who would find your work genuinely interesting—who care about history, culture, language, place, community, ideas—and who will never read the journal article. Not because they’re unwilling, but because the form doesn’t reach them. They’re already listening to podcasts. They’re just not hearing from you.
Public scholarship isn’t a compromise on rigor. It’s a different discipline: one that asks you to communicate without sacrificing substance, to find the story inside the argument, to trust that your audience can follow you if you give them a way in.
There’s pressure in academic culture to hold your ideas back until they’re finished. That caution makes sense for some things. But it can also mean years of working in isolation on questions that others are thinking about, or that others could help with if they knew what you were doing.
A podcast lets you share work in progress without committing to conclusions you haven’t reached. It invites conversation. Unexpected connections—collaborators, sources, perspectives you wouldn’t encounter at a conference—often start with someone hearing something and reaching out.
We’re all terrified of being revealed as amateurs, but in fact, today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love, regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career—who often has the advantage over the professional. Because they have little to lose, amateurs are willing to try anything and share the results. Amateurs might lack formal training, but they’re all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that others can learn from their failures and successes. — Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!
We can help you at any stage:
The barrier to starting is lower than you think. Come in with an idea.