June 24, 2020
Our emotional connection to environmental and climate change issues — and the COVID-19 pandemic — is the focus of some of the variety of podcasts now being produced at the University of Washington.
Here’s a quick look at a few such UW-created podcasts, from benevolent marketing to Arctic geopolitics — and a classics professor’s work being featured in a podcast produced by the Times Literary Supplement.
“Voices Unbound: Enviro-Amplify”
EarthLab / UW Tacoma
Hosted by Robin Evans-Agnew, associate professor, UW Tacoma Nursing and Healthcare Leadership Program.
“What do people think about environmental challenges? And what do they do every day to survive those challenges? We explore these questions in this podcast series,” say co-principal investigators Evans-Agnew and Christopher Schell, urban ecologist and assistant professor in UW Tacoma’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences.
Beginning in 2019 and continuing earlier this year, this team of UW Tacoma professors and students asked people in Tacoma and the South Sound to fill out postcards with their own answers to those questions.
“We stood in the street, behind booths, in the sunshine and the rain … We chose places where we wouldn’t necessarily find the sort of people who already had a voice,” the researchers wrote. The team gathered about 1,000 postcards in all, and those responses are the subject of the podcasts.
Each podcast presents selections from the postcards, and the researchers also discuss their experiences. One episode features UW Tacoma plastics researcher and geoscience lecturer Julie Masura.
Evans-Agnew said the team plans a second series of the podcast that will focus on COVID-19, environment justice and police oppression issues.
“I also do not want to lose sight of the continued — and quiet roll-backs of environmental policy that are occurring in the shadows of this unrest,” Evans-Agnes said. “It is the untold story of this time.”
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“Facing It: A podcast about love, loss and the natural world”
Written and hosted by Jennifer Atkinson, senior lecturer, UW Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences.
Jennifer Atkinson
“This podcast explores the emotional burden of climate change,” writes Atkinson, “and why despair leaves so many people unable to respond to our existential threat.”
The fourth episode, “Coping with Climate Despair in Four Steps,” outlines strategies to “beat the climate blues and become an agent of change.” Atkinson’s research focus is the environmental humanities and her teaching explores intersections between environmental studies and American culture and literature.
Atkinson added: “Meanwhile, frontline communities — particularly people of color, indigenous communities, and other historically-marginalized groups — are experiencing the heaviest mental health impacts of climate disruption and displacement. This series introduces ways to move from despair to action by addressing the psychological roots of our unprecedented ecological loss.”
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Arctic and International Relations Podcast Series
Hosted and produced by the Canadian Studies Center,
Jackson School of International Studies.
The inaugural 45-minute episode of this occasional podcast series features political science doctoral student Ellen Ahlness
Ellen Ahlness
interviewing Tony Penikett, former two-term premier of the Yukon Territory and the Jackson School’s 2013-14 Fulbright Canada Chair in Arctic studies.
The interview focuses on Penikett’s 2018 book “Hunting the Northern Character.” Publisher’s notes say the book explores the nature of a new “Northern consciousness” or “Arctic identity” beyond pop culture stereotypes that “fail to capture northern realities.”
Ahlness is a 2020-2021 Foreign Language and Area Studies fellow in Inuktitut with the Canadian Studies Center, which produces the podcast with the Jackson School’s International Policy Institute and Center for Global Studies.
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“Marketing for Good”
Hosted by Erica Mills Barnhart, senior lecturer in the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance and co-director of the Nancy Bell Evans Center on Nonprofits & Philanthropy.
Erica Mills Barnhart
“Marketing can be a force for good,” says Mills Barnhart, but it can also be “complicated, confusing and downright nerve-wracking.” Her podcast seeks to bring clarity to marketing chaos. “I talk about how you can think about marketing differently so you can do marketing differently with less stress and more joy.”
Mills Barnhart has produced the podcast weekly since April, with 1,500 downloads so far. Most episodes are a half-hour to an hour in length and have featured interviews with the UW’s Hanson Hosein of the Department of Communication and Akhtar Badshah of the Evans School.
“Whether you work for a for-profit corporation or a nonprofit organization,” Mills Barnhart writes, “if you’re out to make the world a better place, this podcast will give you the insight and inspiration you need to market your mission with clarity and confidence.”
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Times Literary Supplement podcast discusses book by UW classics professor Sarah Levin-Richardson
Sarah Levin-Richardson
A book by Sarah Levin-Richardson, UW professor of classics, was the subject of a recent podcast by the Times Literary Supplement, a publication of the Sunday Times of London. The book is “The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, Class, and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
The podcast series is called “Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon” and the episode about Levin-Richardson’s book, featuring Rebecca Langlands of the University of Exeter is “Vanilla Sex in Pompeii.” Langlands also published a review of the book.
Read more on the Department of Classics’ website, and listen to the podcast either streaming or downloadable from iTunes.
Tag(s): Canadian Studies Center • Christopher Schell • Department of Classics • EarthLab • Ellen Ahlness • Erica Mills Barnhart • Evans School of Public Policy & Governance • Jackson School of International Studies • Jennifer Atkinson • Julie Masura • Nancy Bell Evans Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy • Robin Evans-Agnew • Sarah Levin-Richardson • UW Bothell • UW Tacoma
