Project
DisPod is the podcast that tells the interdisciplinary research of DISPOC, the Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Siena. Every episode is a story told in several voices around the methods, ideas and results put forward by the researchers.
DisPod, the podcast on research between populism, multilingualism and inequality
- Client
- University of Siena
- Area
- Identity, Development, Relations
- Year
- 2022
- Main link
- Listen to the podcast
The DisPod project came out of the need to widen the communication of research under way in the Department to a not strictly specialist audience, and at the same time to involve academics and researchers directly in the practice of "dissemination", where the academic world can still be considered an early adopter.
Podcasting is by now increasingly widespread, and listening figures released by the main platforms confirm its continuous growth; academic research is often brought into science and culture journalism within podcast programmes, but in most cases it is called on as an "external" voice. It is rarer, in Italy today, for the academic world to produce podcasts of its own.
Communicating scientific research in the social, political and cognitive sciences through podcasting
With the Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences we began this experiment, which sits exactly halfway between specialist dialogue and science communication. Thanks to the hybrid nature of the format, many kinds of listener can benefit from it: students who want to understand what the research in their department is about, because research is the true heart of teaching; stakeholders outside the academic world, such as businesses and organisations wanting to open a dialogue with the University; other researchers or academics who want to keep up with the work of the Siena group; and above all non-specialist listeners interested in the subjects on the agenda.
The subjects discussed are those at the heart of the excellence project funded in 2018 by the Ministry; the horizon in which they are placed is interdisciplinarity understood as a concrete working practice, to be refined progressively and in a participatory way.
The podcast therefore deals with subjects such as populism and the redefinition of the concepts of politics and society, multilingualism, inequality and the precarisation of the spheres of life, and above all how the social, political and cognitive sciences can develop working methods that are not merely multidisciplinary but genuinely interdisciplinary.