Podcasts have become a powerful medium for information in recent years, and science communication is no exception. If you are a science enthusiast keen on podcasts, you might be familiar with dynamic shows that make science accessible and engaging, like RadioLab, 60-Second Science, and The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.
How about Earth News Interviews or Raw Talk? If you haven’t heard about them, they are two remarkable student-run podcasts at U of T with a specific focus on science communication. Despite having distinct subject matters and styles of delivery, both shows strive to introduce unique perspectives to science communication and make it more accessible.
Bringing what’s underground to light
Earth News Interviews is presented by undergraduate students Dean Hiler and Sofia Panasiuk, the vice-president and sales representative of the Undergraduate Earth Science Association, respectively. The show features discussions with experts on major topics in the field of earth sciences accompanied by an in-depth dissection of relevant journal articles.
In an interview with The Varsity, Hiler and Panasiuk said that since creating the podcast in June, they have set a clear purpose of making the earth sciences more mainstream. They are approaching this goal in various ways.
The first thing that distinguishes Earth News Interviews from other science communication podcasts is how personal it is. The show is not only unique in its engaging conversational style, but special through the series of personal questions they pose to their guests.
As Hiler explained, “We want students to kind of recognize themselves in the professors’ stories… you don’t know what your future holds, but you can kind of see a resemblance of yourself in these professors’ lives.”
The perspective Hiler and Panasiuk bring as undergraduate students is another valuable feature of the podcast. They both emphasize the fact that they are not experts and are learning along with the audience.
“It might be surprising, but [when reading papers] we are usually not too familiar with the concepts either,” Panasiuk admitted. “And we have to do the background.”
In an interview about continental plate collisions, trying to make sense out of the idea of two plates colliding, Hiler asked the week’s guest, “I guess it’s like Play-Doh and you push it together?” Questions and analogies like this make Earth News Interviews particularly approachable.
Producing the show and working to make concepts accessible has helped Panasiuk acquire skills that are extremely important in the science discipline: “The skill of being able to read research papers is very, very important… personally, I’ve found that reading these papers has really helped me to get to know what the format of a scientific paper is, how to collect data… [and] how to make it flow nicely.”
Getting personal with medicine
Compared to the eight-month-old Earth News Interviews, Raw Talk has a longer history. Established in 2016, Raw Talk started with guest-based episodes that aimed to foster connections between students and researchers within the Institute of Medical Science (IMS). Now, the show is on its fifth season with a team of 40 people. It has evolved to adopt topic-based episodes, involving the voices of multiple experts from all institutions in the discipline.
In the course of its development, diversity has been a key factor in making Raw Talk accessible. The previous seasons of the podcast have allowed them to speak with a variety of guests — you hear soundbites from not just the researchers, but also students working on the topic and sometimes patients of the disease being discussed. In recent seasons, Raw Talk has been working to improve the diversity of guests and their perspectives, and to cover a wider range of topics.
By incorporating guests outside of IMS, the podcast suggests the importance of cooperation in the field of medical science, and the diverse perspectives featured in the podcast demonstrate medical science as an extensively diversified discipline. “With the tuberculosis episode, we covered both public health all the way down to the molecular biology element of it,” said executive producer Jesse Knight in an interview with The Varsity.
The creators also focus on a scope of featured topics that address important conversations of this day and age, such as “social determinants of health perspective and people who may have barriers accessing health care,” according to Knight.
Signing off
In effect, the expansion of topics seen on Raw Talk and Earth News Interviews signals what’s especially meaningful about these two student-run podcasts at U of T: they are attempting to not just foster science communication, but also use it as a vehicle to raise awareness for prevalent social issues.
Yagnesh Ladumor, another executive producer and show host for Raw Talk, connected this goal of awareness to a recent episode on the Moderna vaccine: “One thing that we can do using our position, experience, [and] knowledge base is disseminate information… We specifically did that episode to drive some science communication and drive some of this myth away from the vaccine… I think that’s a great position to be in.”
Panasiuk and Hiler find themselves in a similar position when discussing the climate crisis through the lens of earth science. As Hiler said, “When you have these big [kinds] of abstract concepts, like climate change, there’s this… barely perceptible increase in the global average temperature… [and] that kind of scale [is] hard to relate to.”
“If you can, while you’re interviewing an expert in a field, ask them to give you examples… It’s good to tie [things] down to people’s everyday experience.”
If you’re interested in podcasting and science communication, Raw Talk is hosting a two-day “Podcast Festival” on February 27–28 with workshops from professional science journalists about starting in audio. Speakers will include RadioLab sound designer Jeremy Bloom and Globe and Mail writer Tanya Talaga.
