Documenting scholarly journeys: 40:40:20—Pacific Women in the Academy

Abstract

The podcast format is relatively new to Pacific scholarship in the humanities, with only a handful of examples produced in the last decade across the region. In this paper, we discuss our reasons for, and experience of, creating a podcast that documents Pacific women scholars and the various ways in which they break institutional glass ceilings. We outline the genealogical framework that shaped our methodological approach to producing the podcast, from recruitment and team dynamic to the curation and strengths-based framing we used to inform our decisions for the production and editing of the podcast. We then discuss the podcast format as one well suited to the collaborative approaches of Pacific women scholars and the power of dialogic knowledge-making forms that come from Indigenous epistemologies. The podcast format can liberate these methodologies from the restrictions of traditional text-based academic outputs and is a meaningful alternative to research methods that focus on the observation and evaluation of Pacific research subjects. Instead, the podcast is a way that powerfully presents Pacific women’s voices as they are: compelling, educative and transformational when presented together.