#201 - Shaun O'Dwyer interviews Chris Haswell (Kyushu University)

Haswell, C. G. (2025). Using Podcast Interviews as a Source of Qualitative Investigation. Cambridge: Ethics International Press

This interview was in response to Shaun's offer to interview me, Chris Haswell, about my second book, “Using podcast interviews as a source of qualitative investigation,” after I had previously interviewed Shaun about his books on Confucianism for the podcast. The interview was conducted in the LiC studios over a cup of coffee and a decade of working together, so the mood was conversational but focused on the academic objective at hand. We were intending to discuss how a podcast can be viewed as its own medium for data collection, unlike a standard journalistic or research interview. The medium of podcasting, as it relates to being a vector of academic endeavor, is, for want of a better word, different.

The first thing we discussed was the source of the material for the book, the podcast, and how it was itself illustrative of an alternative form of data collection:

(01:28) I go back to its initial founding … it was an attempt to create something that myself and Jonathan hadn't found before, which was the ability to talk to people whom we'd cited a lot in our work, that maybe other people because, you know, they hadn't gone to the conferences where these people speak. A lot of them come from different countries, and so they might not have been able to actually meet them in person; they'd actually hear the voices. And so I think that's what makes it different from other projects, in that you can actually hear the voice of a person that you've seen the name of before, and it allows them outside of the realms of maybe a five to 8000 word journal article to really elucidate how they were feeling at the time, and perhaps how their thoughts have developed since they actually wrote everything down, locked it off, sent it off to be published. 

As expressed here, the initial motivation for podcast is elucidated: we couldn’t go to conferences and we, Jonathan and I, both believed that it was the conference down-time, the coffee-and-chat meet-ups that can often be the most productive for networking and forming long-term connections with shared interests - hearing someone’s voice as they explain something that may have been central to the writing process but was not included in the paper is the real value of being able to speak with people who you cite.

The interview then goes on to investigate what it is about the podcast medium that is its own realm of investigation.

(21:53) The podcast, when viewed from the outside, appears to be a genre of interview. But given how many different categories it is in and the way that the medium is used, it isn't a single genre, so once you've gone past genre, you get into register analysis and then understanding that some might be comedic, some might be highly academic. Some are more, you know, close-knit, and you know, familial, familiar between the two people, and so the data you're collecting cannot ever be put into a single genre category. Once you get past that level, other frames of analysis have to be included if you're going to get any value from it, and then create a theory upon which you can apply to future interviews. So it was all about creating an effective frame that could be either replicated and/or tested in future interviews.

The podcast is not a sub-genre of interview; it is its own genre of informed conversation. That is to say, the register rarely rises to ‘formal’ even though the content is not ‘informal.’ All the interviewers we have had so far have been very good at preparing for the interview and marshaling their background knowledge to ensure the interview goes beyond, sometimes way beyond, the scope of the original paper to give a lot of insight into the interviewee's thought processes.

We also discussed the value of having an established academic podcast attached to a university faculty because it provides another method of networking with visiting academics who are looking for other avenues to publicize their work:

(31:57) I certainly think that when the idea of the podcast comes up. It seems like everyone in our department kind of knows that I have this podcast because I've interviewed enough people around, not just in the FLC, but also in the humanities department and also in the economics department: “Oh, there is an academic on campus who has a podcast,” that was one of the motivating things behind publishing it and trying to find a vector for it academically to show that, no, it's not just me wasting my time trying to fill up a media space. I lose money making this. So I had to find some other value that wasn't just financial. It had to be cultural, social, even, you know, for want of a better word, a moral way of justifying the time that I put into it. And I think if it forms networks outside of the university, knowing that someone in this department reaches out to people, and I think that the current numbers are 27 different universities that have been featured in the 200-plus interviews that we've done, and that those are just the main ones.

Overall, the content produced by the podcast interviews benefits more than just the people in the room in front of the microphones. By finding multiple avenues for disseminating the interview's content, the podcast becomes an advertisement for itself, a proof of concept that what used to be called ‘new media’ is becoming the primary medium of interaction among people with shared interests. My interest is academia, and I am happy to have discovered that others would like to share the space.