Tag: Podcasts

"Colleague Chat" banner with james Nagle headshot over stained glass window background

Scholars Do More than Write

Kyle 1 Comment

Part of what excites me about audio scholarship is getting to share and engage with other researchers’ ideas in their own words and their own voices.

In every academic field in which I’ve studied and contributed (education, ministry/theology, engineering), I’ve always been puzzled by the disconnect between how research actually happens and how we recognize it.

It’s generally harder to get a piece of research published in a peer-reviewed journal than it is to get it accepted to a conference. And so journal articles tend to be what tenure committees, etc., seek out and reward.

But I’ve always found myself being much more impacted by others’ ideas— and I think also able to impact others with mine—through the more verbal and visual presentations that happen at conferences and similar spaces.

Of course, I’m all kinds of biased.

I’m an Enneagram 2, so I process the world through relationships and interpersonal engagement. I’m a media scholar, so I tend to find the format and affordances of text-dominated articles to be pretty restricting and unsatisfying. And as my mother wrote to my third grade teacher in a “tell me about your child”-type informal assessment, “Kyle would rather talk than write.” Still true.

Nevertheless, as I say in the introduction to the second interstitial bonus episode of my dissertation podcast, Becoming Tapestry, the writing/text-centric view of research feels to me to be something of a distortion of scholarly reality. Or perhaps it’s better to say that it doesn’t give the whole picture.

Scholars develop ideas in large part by talking them out in meetings with colleagues, by sharing them with their students in the classroom, by following where a conversation leads in synchronous spaces and not just asynchronous feedback requests and peer reviews.

I’m not arguing that the latter aren’t important. But I do believe the process is as important as the product in academic research, and the process is much more likely to involve talking.

So I’m delighted to present as part of Becoming Tapestry this “colleague chat” with my dear friend and fellow religious education scholar James Nagle.

We spoke in 2019, after my talk introducing the idea of faith-adjacent pedagogy, about where our work intersects.

Out on Waters book cover

Nagle teaches in and studies Roman Catholic high schools. He challenges Christian leaders of all stripes to think about the disaffiliative trends I discuss in episode 1 through lenses other than loss, failure, or departure.

Nagle also reminds us there’s a lot to learn from the young people on this journey. (Though of course it’s not just young people walking the disaffiliative path.)

People who “deconvert,” to use the term he engages with, often do so for religious reasons, and there are usually still marks of “religiousness” remaining in their lives and habits even when they become Nones or even atheists.

In short, Nagle and I are both interested in the educational possibilities that emerge around the edges of faith community boundaries and beyond binary, “in or out” notions of religious identity.

In this conversation, we had fun exploring Nagle’s work and chatting a bit about how mine relates to it. I’m grateful for the chance to show forth this mode of playing with ideas and making new knowledge, and of course for my friend’s willingness to play along with me.

And I hope, whatever your affiliation, you’ll check out his book Out on Waters: The Religious Life and Learning of Young Catholics Beyond the Church.

Reconstructed Instagram post: Tapestry volunteer training

Faith-Adjacent Spaces Are Where Religion Intersects Everything Else

Kyle 1 Comment

If you’ve been following along in the story of my dissertation research, you’re probably enjoying getting to know Tapestry and their model for “starting with the work” in order to be and to become a community.

But if you’re like me, or even like Tapestry’s co-directors as their organization has developed, then it might be hard for you to further understand the nature of this “church that doesn’t look like a church.” In the new episode of Becoming Tapestry, I explore this problem and propose a way of thinking about it.

I shared in Episode 1 that social theorist Bruno Latour is skeptical of our often unnoticed belief that calling a group by a particular name automatically tells us something about its members. It’s better to stick close to the members themselves and the interactions they have, he says.

That focus on interaction can help us appreciate an insight from another social theorist, Doreen Massey. It’s about space.

Space is more than connected locations, more than the material or even digital places where people hang out. It isn’t empty. It isn’t flat. It isn’t a Euclidean grid to be filled like the Star Trek holodeck.

“Space is a social practice,” says Massey. It’s distinct people relating to each other, often across significant differences, and often according to some unpredictable trajectory of change and becoming. Space is a great “pin cushion” of interconnected “stories-so-far.”

In my story of Tapestry, the extension from understanding the organization and its mentor teams as connected groups-in-formation (Latour) to connected spaces convened by those group members (Massey) lays the groundwork for tackling what feels to me like the biggest challenge facing faith leaders in a time of disconnection.

How do we understand religious belonging when people are religiously disaffiliating? How do we meaningfully and respectfully include people who feel strongly that they don’t want to be labelled? How do we understand the impact of faith on people’s lives without resorting to the often toxic binary of insider/outsider?

Here’s my take:

If we pay attention to spaces rather than groups, we start to emphasize relationship as it is practiced rather than how it is represented by fields in a membership database. We engage according to who is showing up in the moment rather than who we wish had showed up—and by their presence and contributions rather than by their membership status.

Here’s the most important part:

The boundaries of spaces, in this way of thinking about them, are much more amorphous and flexible than in our typical ways of describing affiliation: member, non-member, visitor/lead/prospect/member-in-training.

We hold space together simply by encountering one another. We do it all the time, and with people of all persuasions.

So when our lens shifts from what happens in the church building among the members of that church (or the online/hybrid service for the worshipers) to what happens when religious people engage in the other spaces of their lives, we don’t need new language or analytic tools. New spaces just mean slightly reconfigured orientations to the religion(s) in question.

When faith, theirs or others’, comes to bear on the spaces they’re moving through, we should simply note the connection. The spatial metaphor of adjacency, of two things being close to or next to or connected to each other, captures how such spaces are experienced in these moments.

  • When the Tapestry co-directors unpack how their background as religious leaders shaped the founding of their organization …
  • When Tapestry teams “borrow” church kitchens or church playgrounds for their meetings …
  • When a Tapestry facilitator uses a popular religious education format to develop the story of how religious concepts have informed the “multi-faith and no faith” guiding principles of the community …
  • When Tapestry turns a church yoga night into a mentor recruiting event …
  • When a beloved Tapestry mentor dies and the team gathers at that same church for her funeral …
  • When Tapestry facilitates a partner organization turning a church sanctuary into a traveling exhibit space …

… we recognize something not exactly religious, but certainly not secular or entirely non-religious. I call it faith-adjacent space. Faith is nearby. Not irrelevant. Visible, as it were, but visible among other salient details as well.

At a time when so many of us are reevaluating our relationship to organized religion, to institutions more broadly, and to our daily practices of relationship and presence, it’s very helpful to have ways of describing religious encounter that don’t center ideas of institutional membership and don’t force some kind of “religious identity acid test” onto every interpersonal interaction in our pluralistic society.

I hope you’ll try out this idea of faith-adjacency as one such way of shifting your understanding of the religious/non-religious/multi-religious spaces you move through each day.

It just might free you up to focus on the relationships you form in those spaces—and all the potentialities those relationships hold.

All this to say: Episode 2 of Becoming Tapestry is now available in your podcast feeds.

Photo of objects from the Tapestry guiding principles story

On the power of bonus episodes

Kyle

When you write your dissertation as a podcast, there isn’t a great way to do footnotes.

I do have some footnotes in my manuscript, at my committee’s suggestion. But I didn’t make any effort to register them in the audio episodes.

Basically, I decided people who would care about footnotes would be willing to do the extra work to track them down via links on the show’s website and investigate without further scaffolding from me. Being more proactive on my part didn’t feel worth the distraction to listeners who, understandably, don’t really care about these extras.

That’s how I handled citations as well.

I do admire shows that find creative ways to mark that a citation has just passed by in the voiceover. The show My Gothic Dissertation, the first dissertation podcast, uses one of those bells you find on desks for when attendants step away. It’s a clever, effective, and maybe necessary device in a humanities dissertation.

Similarly, at least one audiobook of David Foster Wallace’s writing—famously reliant on footnotes—inserts the “text” of footnotes directly with a temporary audio effect to mark the shift.

Anyway, I decided there were plenty of audio and cognitive layers present in my show already. I didn’t want to introduce another.

Still, the function of a footnote—to stick a little text off in a corner somewhere, where it doesn’t disrupt the flow of the main narrative—is incredibly useful. Maybe especially for people who like to qualify, complicate, and otherwise unpack what they’re saying/writing as they say/write it.

At a larger scale, that feels similar to what a bonus episode is all about too. Because Becoming Tapestry is an ethnographic project, I work on the assumption that my primary job is to immerse you in the “spaces” (that is, the sites and relationships) of the work.

This desire tended to lead me to say to myself “Add a little more tape. Just a little more. That last thing they said was so interesting! That introductory comment provides helpful context! I love the sound of so-and-so’s voice in that redundant sentence!”

Of course, the opposite usually needs to happen. The bulk of my editing energy was spent making cuts. And more cuts. And more cuts.

So it was incredibly useful to be able to say, in effect, “I’m going to play you a tiny bit of tape here, and if you’re interested in a full immersion, check out the bonus episode.” Which is what I do in Act 2 of the opening chapter.

And now that first bonus episode is available in your podcast feed. It’s the complete audio of Hannah introducing the guiding principles of Tapestry at a monthly mentor training.

There’s no better scene to immerse you in, because it’s representative of the moment when I realized I truly could write a religious education dissertation about an organization that isn’t traditionally religious.

So here’s a little bit of Godly Play, remixed with practices of organizational storytelling. The photo at the top of this post contains all the items Hannah speaks about.

With the introductory comments from me, it’s about 18 minutes. And it’s a great way to get to know my research partners.

Enjoy!

Dissertation Defense screenshot!

Introducing ‘Becoming Tapestry’

Kyle 2 Comments

I made it!

On April 13, 2022, after more than 1,100 hours of work on the project excluding coursework, a committee comprising education and communication scholars Lalitha Vasudevan, Ioana Literat, Detra Price-Dennis, and Patricia Martínez Álvarez accepted my dissertation as submitted.

I will receive my doctoral hood May 23 in a ceremony at the Louis Armstrong Tennis Stadium in Queens. But for all intents and purposes, I am now a doctoral graduate of the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the U.S.

My degree is a Doctor of Education (EdD), Communication in Education. My dissertation, Becoming Tapestry: A Multimodal Ethnographic Podcast Exploring Storytelling and Belonging in a Faith-Adjacent Foster Youth Mentoring Network, is being delivered to Proquest Dissertations.

But more importantly, my dissertation is a podcast. And you can listen right now!

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s the elevator pitch:

Organized religion in the U.S. is changing. More people than ever before identify with no particular religious tradition. But this disaffiliative trend isn’t just about religion. Individuals are participating less or opting out entirely from institutions and communities.

Against the backdrop of my interest in media making and religious education in this environment, I found a spiritual community that was growing and thriving on the highly secular U.S. West Coast. Tapestry is a foster youth mentoring network run by religious leaders according to flexible, inclusive values inspired by religious principles. It’s a “church that doesn’t look like a church.” It’s a faith-adjacent space of healing and belonging where the participants themselves get to decide how to be together and what it all means.

I’ve been embedded for more than three years as a kind of unofficial member of this community, a religious education researcher and multimedia storytelling facilitator. My mission was to co-design ways for Tapestry mentor teams to make meaning of their experiences together by producing Digital Stories, very short videos that weave together voiceover, photographs, and a simple soundtrack.

Becoming Tapestry is my audio documentary of the journey, my own digital story of the Digital Stories. Along the way, I develop new ways of thinking about religious education amid social change, new ways of facilitating team-based self-reflective media production, and new ways of composing and disseminating ethnographic research.

Wanna learn more? Episode 1, in which I elaborate on this framing and position myself within my field site, is available now where you get your podcasts.

Can’t wait? The entire show is ready for your binge listen at becomingtapestry.net/podcast. I’m excited to tell you more in the coming weeks!

Thrilling Adventure Hour live

Something creative: A story about the Thrilling Adventure Hour

Kyle

Because I now blog elsewhere(s), this space has apparently turned into a blog about sermons and my podcast obsessions. To continue in that latter vein, allow me to share a recent bit of silliness.

I just participated in a fantastic workshop by the Center for Digital Storytelling as part of a continuing education project through Virginia Seminary’s Second Three Years program. I was hoping to bone up on my video creation skills (this bit with Tricia was fun but needs some work on the production end). Boy did I. That’s not to say I’ve now become a master, but I’m always (foolishly) surprised with how much progress you can make with a good guide.

My fellow classmates told a lot of tremendously powerful stories of love and loss and love lost. I was wowed by these, but I knew I wanted to try my hand at something in a different mood.

So here’s my crack at a story about my trip to New York Comic Con to see the Thrilling Adventure Hour live. It was one of the highlights of my 2013, and I am glad for the chance to share the story.

Sarah Lumbard introduction at e-Formation 2013

Kyle 3 Comments

So I’ve spent much of the first year of my new job helping plan e-Formation 2013, a conference on faith formation for a connected digital world. Yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker, Sarah Lumbard, vice president of content strategy and operations at NPR (she was really great, by the way, but that’s not what this post is about). Suffice it to say, I am a big fan of NPR, and of certain brands in particular.

I’ll admit it, I geeked out a little. Rather than give you a bunch of self-conscious narrative, let me just set it up with some tweets and then tell you what I said.

tweets

Like many Episcopalians, I am a serious fan of public radio. But my relationship with NPR changed recently. I’d listened for years to a couple of their podcasts, but only to catch up with the on-air shows I care about. Then about six months ago, my friend Randall Curtis told me about an NPR show called Pop Culture Happy Hour. PCHH isn’t a radio show; it’s a standalone podcast, featuring four otherwise “off-air” NPR contributors.

These friends get together each week and talk about the stuff they love: movies, TV shows, music, books, comics … you name it. They are smart, they are funny, and they end each episode with a segment about what’s making them happy this week. I fell instantly in love and proceeded to devour more than a hundred back episodes. I’ve since gotten hooked on a number of other podcasts, many of which I found out about from PCHH panelist Glen Weldon.

Let me share two quick reflections on this experience that are relevant to our task today.

First: Imagine if the hundreds of hours I spent listening to podcasts this spring had included even a small percentage of time listening to religious programming–not Pat Robertson stuff but thoughtful, culturally engaged, theologically sophisticated content. That could be a couple dozen hours, about the same amount of time that a fairly serious parishioner might have spent in church during those same months. As it turns out, I do listen to a small percentage of religious podcasting, and a lot of it is really good. I have an increasingly difficult time imagining what my faith life would be like without podcasts, and that’s just one of the media available to us for touching people’s lives “between Sundays.”

Second: This experience has reassured me of the power of new media to create genuine connection and remarkable loyalty, both key to any process of discipleship. I rush home on the afternoons that new episodes of PCHH get released, and not just because that happens on Fridays. And when I tweet the gang a question or comment after listening, I know there’s a pretty good chance they’ll respond. Am I “friends” with any of them in the way we’ve historically understood that word? Of course not. But they bring a lot of joy and fun into my life, and they regularly share a bit of theirs with me and thousands of like-minded listeners. That’s something I’m very grateful for, and I bet I’m not the only person in this room who can say the same sort of thing about a faith leader they’ve connected with through similar means: sermon podcasts, YouTube videos, blog posts, Facebook updates, etc.

I think we’re just beginning to understand how the new media ecology creates opportunities for the church to reach out and touch the people we serve, and the people we hope to serve. With that, it’s my privilege to introduce someone who can teach us a thing or two about this water we’re dipping our toes into.

“As Vice President of Content Strategy and Operations, [NPR’s] Sarah Lumbard helps coordinate strategy across the News, Programming and Digital divisions.” Previously, “she served as Senior Director of Product Strategy and Development, and led and managed all of the NPR digital initiatives on existing and emerging platforms to ensure that the public can find and enjoy NPR and station content wherever they choose … Under her leadership, NPR has achieved triple-digit growth across all mobile platforms.” Please join me in welcoming Sarah Lumbard.

It was a great day. Thanks Sarah, Linda, and all you supportive conference-goers who were willing to indulge me. I hope my thoughts were pedagogically valuable in context besides being “all fan girl,” as someone said to me afterward.

I love my job.