Southern California Researchers Use Podcasting to Share Pandemic Stories
Amy Hill
In the spring and summer of 2020, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of professors and graduate students from various Southern California universities (University of California Riverside, University of California Irvine, and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona) sensed that their world was about to be upended. They saw the existing economic and health disparities among their fellow residents in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties begin to fracture in ways that couldn’t be ignored. As a research team, they understood the necessity of collecting, preserving, and sharing these stories as essential qualitative data that could eventually be used to study the social, economic, and health issues related to COVID-19. They also recognized the value of sharing stories in real time during the waning stages of the pandemic.
In January of 2022, StoryCenter began working with this team of dedicated researchers to build the institutional capacity to produce a professional and sustainable public-facing podcast. Over eight weeks, we guided a cohort of ten graduate students and faculty through a customized podcasting workshop process. The team created a brand new podcast to showcase their early COVID-19 qualitative research data for a broad, public audience. They collaboratively developed a theme and stylistic identity for the podcast, contributed ideas for episode topics, established collaborative teams, and negotiated a set of episode structures within which to work. Participating graduate students and professors used selections from hundreds of interviews, quotes from scholarship, and personal storytelling commentary to build ten different episodes within the thematic scope of the overall podcast. StoryCenter provided the researchers with the operational guidance to develop a sustainable plan for producing consistent episodes and the technical expertise to publish the episodes on a professional hosting platform. The workshop culminated in a listening party where each working group shared an original podcast segment.
The group officially launched Healthy Disruptions in July of 2022. Amy Dao (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona), Juliet McMullin (UC Irvine), and Joshua Liashenko and Sahar Foruzan (UC Riverside) produced the group’s first episode: Series Premiere. Jennifer Syvertsen (UC Riverside) and Sahar Foruzan (UC Riverside) produced the group’s second episode: The Politics of Pandemics. Have a listen below.