Podcast Intellectuals Podcast Panel #3 with Allison Carruth and Ellen Horne

Summary

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Podcast Intellectuals Panel #3 with Allison Carruth and Ellen Horne

New Books Network – July 3, 2026
Panel Theme: Audio & Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting

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Episode Overview

This episode features a conversation between Alison Carruth (Princeton) and Ellen Horne (NYU) as part of a conference panel on the intersection of podcasting, scholarship, and science storytelling. The panel explores how narrative audio is used in scholarly research, with a focus on environmental and science communication, community engagement, the unique affordances of the audio medium, and the practicalities of making and funding such work. Notable case studies from Radiolab and Blue Lab projects enrich the discussion, providing insights into both process and impact.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Foundations of Environmental Audio Storytelling

[02:41] Alison Carruth:

• Blue Lab at Princeton is a cross-media effort focusing on environmental storytelling through audio, documentary film, photo essays, and long-form nonfiction.
• Princeton’s unique context: Blue Lab is the only non-STEM group in an engineering/environmental science building, pulling from both academic and community expertise.
• Carruth and her husband, Baron, co-founded Blue Lab after a decade at UCLA.

"We now are helmed by Baron and me are producing a documentary short and a feature length documentary film. We've also done other forms of work, long form nonfiction... We're this sort of multimedia and we're sort of an odd bird here at Princeton."
— Alison Carruth (03:02)

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2. The Challenge of Science Communication

[04:41] Alison Carruth & [06:41] Ellen Horne:

• Traditional science communication focuses on certainty and expertise, often alienating or oversimplifying, and doesn't engage with ambiguity, doubt, or the “messiness” of scientific inquiry.
• Radio/audio offers a way to invite the public into the real process—which includes hesitation and uncertainty—thereby building trust.
• The pandemic provided a vivid example: audio diaries from frontline doctors captured the evolving, uncertain, and emotional reality of science in action.

"The refrain that we’re trying to really upend is ‘the science is clear.’...This isn’t working. So one of our experiments with Blue Lab...is to see how can we build relationships with scientists and other communities so that...they will start to let invite us into the messiness of their work and their lives."
— Alison Carruth (05:56)

"What strikes me about [the audio diary] is the role of hesitation and uncertainty in establishing authority...It’s counterintuitive, right? He’s honest about what they know and don’t know, and it helps you actually trust this person."
— Ellen Horne (14:06)

Notable Moment:
[09:26–13:59] Radiolab ER Doctor’s Audio Diaries

• Emotional experience in the ICU during COVID-19; uncertainty around medical responses; peer collaboration through informal channels and rapid information sharing.

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3. Community Knowledge vs. Scientific Expertise

[15:57] Alison Carruth:

• Case studies from Blue Lab, such as the “Archival Ecologies” and “Carried by Water” audio projects, demonstrate how community experience and local knowledge often diverge from scientific consensus, especially regarding causality in disasters (e.g., the Lytton wildfire, Typhoon Haiyan).
• Reconciling these knowledge forms is both a challenge and an opportunity for narrative audio.

"There was this huge conflict about, like, what caused the fire and on whose knowledge and expertise were we going to base that determination?"
— Alison Carruth (19:37)

Notable Moment:
[20:03–22:20] Blue Lab Project Clips:

• “Archival Ecologies” opens with a First Nation leader rather than scientists, foregrounding ritual and lived experience.

"We start not with the scientists...but with one of the First Nation leaders who was leading a kind of ritual that Jamie was able to record."
— Alison Carruth (19:56)

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4. Impact of Podcasts on Science Engagement & Recruitment

[23:27] Ellen Horne:

• The inclusive, narrative style pioneered by Radiolab and other science podcasts has demonstrably inspired future scientists and brought science into wider, less specialist audiences.
• There is support (e.g., Sloan Foundation, NSF) for innovative audio and cross-media projects in science communication.

"I've met people who now have PhDs because they were inspired by Radiolab episodes. So it's been really kind of incredible."
— Ellen Horne (24:29)

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5. Audio as a Medium: Affordances and Distinctions

[25:57] Alison Carruth & [26:43] Ellen Horne:

• Audio enables intimacy, vulnerability, and nuanced storytelling that cameras may inhibit.
• Audio can go places cameras can't, provides perceived anonymity, and accommodates emotion and reflection.
• Challenges include: lower reach compared to radio/TV, funding obstacles, but high potential for deep connection and educational impact.

"A microphone can go places that cameras really can’t. And I think people get a level of comfort...in a recorded conversation...allowing themselves to have emotion and be real people."
— Ellen Horne (26:43)

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6. Building Audience & Measuring Impact

[37:40] Alison Carruth:

• Blue Lab measures success in micro-publics and academic engagement—rather than mass reach—tracking impact at a community and participatory level.
• Notably, their project on Typhoon Haiyan saw half its audience listen from the Philippines, indicating meaningful regional impact.

"For a lot of our team...5,000 listens for the mind of the [project], that's an impact. What has also been meaningful to us is to really get local about that."
— Alison Carruth (39:05)

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7. Practical Aspects: Editing, Outreach, and Funding

[35:44] Ellen Horne:

• Edit interviews to clarify and shape complex topics—curiosity and deep conversation are more important than having technical expertise.
• Funding sources include the NSF Informal Science Education program, Simons Foundation, Templeton; partnership models between podcasts and academic labs are emerging.
• Ethical protocols and IRB processes vary widely; sometimes Blue Lab develops project-specific ethical charters, especially when IRB protocols are insufficient (e.g., when working with Indigenous communities).

"We also separately came up with our own sort of ethical charter...Consent, about participation, about co-production of this work..."
— Alison Carruth (47:01)

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8. Responsible Storytelling: Blindspots and Editorial Ethics

[40:56] Ellen Horne:

• Prior failures at Radiolab (e.g., not seeking enough feedback before airing controversial topics) motivated more inclusive editorial practices and willingness to abandon stories if editorial clarity can’t be achieved.
• Consulting outside voices and inviting stakeholders into the process helps mitigate harm and improve quality.

"Sometimes the best thing you can do is kill a story. Where you're like, maybe we aren't the people to tell this."
— Ellen Horne (42:26)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Trust and Uncertainty:
  “The role of hesitation and uncertainty in establishing authority...It’s counterintuitive, right?” – Ellen Horne [14:06]

• On Community and Science:
  “There was this huge conflict about, like, what caused the fire and on whose knowledge and expertise were we going to base that determination?” – Alison Carruth [19:37]

• On Audience Building:
  “5,000 listens ... that's an impact. What has also been meaningful to us is to really get local about that.” – Alison Carruth [39:05]

• On Editorial Responsibility:
  “The best thing you can do is kill a story...maybe we aren’t the people to tell this.” – Ellen Horne [42:26]

• On Podcasting Process:
  “It's not the host's job to explain it. It's the host’s job to be curious.” – Ellen Horne [35:48]

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Recommendations & Resources Mentioned

• Podcasts:
  • Radiolab, Science Friday, Hidden Brain, Ologies, Unexplainable (Vox), Drilled, Floodlines (The Atlantic)
• Funding Bodies:
  • Sloan Foundation, NSF AISL (Advancing Informal STEM Learning), Simons Foundation, Templeton Foundation
• Techniques:
  • Encourage listening to full episodes or albums, turning off shuffle/algorithm interference, and listening in an immersive setting.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:41] Alison Carruth on Blue Lab's mission & Princeton context
• [06:41] Ellen Horne on Radiolab’s quest for “messy” scientific conversations
• [09:26–13:59] ER Doctor’s COVID-19 audio diaries (trust, emotion, and uncertainty)
• [19:37] “Archival Ecologies” — community vs. scientific knowledge
• [23:27] Ellen Horne on podcast inspiration and Radiolab’s audience impact
• [26:43] Audio’s affordances compared to film and TV
• [37:40] Measuring impact: audiences, micro-publics, and academic engagement
• [40:56] Strategies for handling controversial editorial topics
• [43:49] Funding, editorial processes, and ethical challenges in producing scholarly podcasts

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Overall Tone and Language

The tone throughout the panel is thoughtful, reflective, and collegial, grounded in both scholarly rigor and creative storytelling passion. Both speakers share candid insights into process, uncertainty, ethical dilemmas, and the joys and struggles of building something new at the intersection of academia, journalism, and audio art.

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For More Information and Useful Resources:

• Explore the mentioned podcasts for models of narrative science storytelling
• For practitioners, investigate NSF AISL grants and consider collaborative models
• For ethical frameworks, adapt project-specific charters when IRB standards fall short

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End of summary.

Transcript

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[Alison Carruth]

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[Robert Boynton]

Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to this special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities Vault Podcast. I'm Robert Boynton. On May 13, 2026, Princeton's center for Human Values hosted a day long conference titled Audio and Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co sponsored by Princeton's Journalism program and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In the third panel, Alison Carruth and Ellen Horn discuss the relationship between podcasting and science. Carruth is a professor at Princeton's Ephron center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. She directs the program in Environmental Studies and leads Blue Lab, an environmental media and storytelling studio. Ellen Horn directs the Podcasting and audio reportage concentration at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Horne was producer of Shreds of Evidence episode investigative podcast that told the story of shocking misconduct at a Virginia State crime lab. Horn has been Executive Editor at Audible and an executive producer for WNYC's Radiolab.

[Alison Carruth]

Our focus is on environmental research and environmental storytelling and on the latter in very research driven but extremely community based storytelling art media projects. We started with audio and I'm happy to talk more in conversation about why and we start with audio and what came out of that three year period. We continue to have audio projects. We now are helmed by Baron and me are producing a documentary short and a feature length documentary film. We've also done other forms of work, long form nonfiction. One of our graduate students had a piece placed in the Atlantic about the New Jersey Meadowlands public art happenings and engagements, photographic work and photo essays. So. So we're this sort of multimedia and we're sort of an odd bird here at Princeton which has a wonderful undergraduate program in journalism led by Eliza Griswold, but no school of Journalism and Media, no school of Film and Television. Very different from where I was for 10 years prior, which was UCLA. We have dedicated space in a huge building called Brigger hall that's about five minute walk from here. We are the only non STEM group in the building. It's building devoted to environmental sciences and at the other end engineering. I just want to say one last thing before we start to have conversation, which is Baron would have been up here with us, but is actually somewhere north of San Francisco along the coast working on the documentary film I mentioned for which he's the director. So can't be here today, but we co founded Blue Lab together. We are a husband and wife team. We have been partners in all things for 23 years and came out here from California as a kind of leap of faith for this adventure.

[Ellen Horn]

So we were just sort of talking about audio and audio documentary and what the kind of resources there are available for telling science stories. So kind of like as a point of inspiration for both of us, I don't know, maybe you want to start a little bit talking about kind of audio in particular or even documentary more broadly.

[Alison Carruth]

Yeah. And then I would love to hear more about this sort of about what it afforded to be this unique audio program in terms of science funders like what they imagined could be brought to bear for science communication and science stories. I've been collaborating closely with both artists and scientists for the better part of 15 years and prior to receiving tenure. To go back to the earlier thread in the first session about the barriers to this for a lot of academics, maybe particularly in the humanities, although I don't think by any means exclusively, I realized that either I was going to start doing public and creative work or I was going to leave academia. And so I figured, well, I'll either get tenure or I won't and that'll be a sort of branch. I realized that for some people that would not be the risk calculus you would come to. And so in working with scientists in particular in my UCLA and prior to that University of Oregon chapters, I got really interested in how on the one hand, the publisher Perish model means that they have very sort of constrained forms in which to publish. And then they get brought into public form historically as elite experts where we're not interested in the messiness of their lives, the doubts they have. And in fact they have rightfully become more and more guarded about letting audiences in to that. Right. But it clearly hasn't been working.

[Panel Moderator or Participant]

Right.

[Alison Carruth]

And I think Radiolab was such a trailblazer in this way and the outside audio. There are other sort of trailblazers that we think about. But the refrain that we're trying to really upend is the science is clear. Right. Like if we can only reach more people with a clear way of explaining that the science is clear on X or Y, vaccines, anthropogenic climate change, you name it, you know, then we'll move the needle and we'll overcome misinformation and anti science. And so this isn't working. And so one of our experiments with Blue Lab, where we have the luxury of time because we're not a station or a program, we have luxury of time on our hands, is to see how can we build relationships with scientists and other communities so that on the science side they will start to let invite us into the messiness of their work in their lives.

[Ellen Horn]

Yeah. So when we connected last week to talk about this panel, one of the things that I was reflecting on was how much of early Radiolab we were trying to find those scientists who would let us in and give us access to have a messier conversation where they could appear as whole human beings.

[Panel Participant]

Right.

[Ellen Horn]

Like that was always something that was really interesting to us, I think, particularly when you know, you're talking about climate change and like these controversial places, that's a concern. I've been thinking a lot about misinformation and the problem that we have in the podcasting world of the like. I'll do my own research expert. Ultimately, I think there's a conversation to have with platforms about their responsibility. And even for shows to be saying we are interested in fact checking and offering evidence so that at least you might have as a consumer of information, you might have some way to distinguish places that are just asking questions and platforming folks that may have very not evidence based experiences from other sources, all of that to say the fact that scientists who are who are in the academy and have peer reviewed work, they just don't meet great guests all the time.

[Panel Moderator or Participant]

Right.

[Ellen Horn]

Like that thing of like if we could only be clear and just cut right to the point and say the thing, there is some value to making people aware that, that I Don't know. I'm really interested in the conversation you guys were having about the, like, the space for the audience in the hesitation in the thinking out loud. Like, that is so important. Right. And I think that there has been a way that the academy speaks to the public or government speaks to the public that is really alienating, and we have to kind of find new ways and explore new opportunities for getting there. I don't know if it's, like, too soon to drop a clip, but I don't know if you can get to the ones that I. Yeah, let's do that.

[Alison Carruth]

Let's go that.

[Ellen Horn]

So this happened at Radiolab, which you want to go to. Let's play the first one.

[Alison Carruth]

The first one, right?

[Ryan Shinkle]

Okay.

[Ellen Horn]

Yeah, we'll play these two. So this is during the pandemic. A former intern of ours at Radiolab was working as an ER doctor, and I wasn't at Radiolab anymore at this point, but they asked him to keep a voice memos while he was working, and then he had conversations with Radiolab producers about what he was seeing in the ER during the early parts of the pandemic in New York City. So let's.

[Alison Carruth]

Okay, here we go.

[Ellen Horn]

Yeah, here's a couple.

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

Today I took a quick trip up to the icu.

[Panel Moderator or Participant]

The ICU is where people who have to be put on ventilators go.

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

It was hard to see all the patients because we have them all in isolated rooms, but I was walking by, looking at their vent settings. I think one thing that really struck me is the amount of hair that I saw. You know, I spent months working in the ICU as a resident. You just get used to seeing IV drips, pumps, ventilator equipment, big bed, and gray hair on it. And I'm walking through this ICU and like, jet black hair, brown hair, blonde hair. That really struck me. I mean, I wish people could see that. I guess I'm used to processing the sadness of the ICU in terms of people at the end of their life who lived a good life. And I always concoct some story in my mind of how they've lived this fulfilling life. And, you know, their family is going to feel sad, but they're going to feel like, okay, this is a sad but inevitable chapter, a final chapter. But with these patients, I. These aren't people who. They're not at that chapter. Their families are not going to feel closure when they die. Their kids still need a dad. You know, it's just scary. April 21, 2020. So, exploring another hypothesis again, coming Back to the same problem. That coronavirus is thought to infect the respiratory tract and the lungs. But we're seeing findings that are beyond that and can't be explained just by the lungs.

[Panel Moderator or Participant]

One of the things he says that's been puzzling is just the crazy array of symptoms he's seeing in people with COVID There's the usual cough, fever, breathing issues. But you also have people reporting neurological issues. Some people, including a few folks that I work with, lost their sense of taste and smell for a while, just

[Ellen Horn]

to kind of orient us in this audio diary, kind of audible evidence transporting us into this world. And then I really think it's what they were talking about. In the second clip I want to play. That's, like, super interesting, but we're seeing veer in two modes, right? One where he's, like, the emotional. Starting in the emotional impact of what he's seeing and then moving into his sort of scientific doctor expertise role. Obviously, this is not. He's a teaching faculty at NYU now, but. But in the second one, he's really talking about the experience of, like, the reality of doing research and the kinds of things that happen before you get to the paper, the conversations that are in rooms like this where you're talking to your colleagues.

[Alison Carruth]

So, yeah.

[Ellen Horn]

Yeah.

[Alison Carruth]

Okay.

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

April 6, 2020.

[Ryan Shinkle]

Number of deaths are up once again.

[Alison Carruth]

Number of people we lost. Number of New Yorkers.

[Ryan Shinkle]

4,000, 758, which is up from 159,

[Panel Participant]

but which is effectively flat for two days.

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

The patient with abdominal pain is probably gonna go over to blue because we're running out of isolated bed. It's just crazy how there's no. There's just no guidance. Like there's.

[Alison Carruth]

Did you mean to get an alcohol urine level?

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

You know, we're all out here just making our own decisions.

[Alison Carruth]

Did you mean to get an alcohol

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

urine model and kind of freeballing it really? I mean, there's just so much we don't know. April 10, 2020. I have never in my short career seen people spreading information amongst ER doctors and ICU doctors, literally by WhatsApp, texting each other images of charts that people have written, kind of really just figuring it out as it goes, which is kind of incredible because in medicine in general, we're very cautious. We'll sit in journal club meetings and debate whether we should give somebody 162 milligrams of aspirin or 325 milligrams of aspirin. We'll literally debate that for hours. But right now, we're just trying different things out almost on a whim.

[Panel Moderator or Participant]

So these WhatsApp groups you were telling

[Alison Carruth]

me about, where you're.

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

Yeah.

[Panel Moderator or Participant]

You're exchanging information with doctors in Italy and China.

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

Yeah. And a lot from Washington, also Washington State.

[Panel Participant]

Right.

[ER Doctor (Radiolab Intern)]

They. Their outbreak started, I don't know what was it, a week or two before ours.

[Alison Carruth]

This, what's.

[Ellen Horn]

What strikes me about this and what I think is just so interesting about it is like the role of hesitation and uncertainty in establishing authority. Like it doesn't, it's not, it's counterintuitive. Right. It's like we see behind the scenes, see the process. He's honest about what they know and don't know. And it helps you to actually trust this person as someone who can give you information. It's really interesting and I think it's something that you've been telling me about the work that you're doing and the way that you guys are positioning science as playing with similar ideas.

[Alison Carruth]

Right.

[Panel Participant]

Yeah.

[Alison Carruth]

I mean, it's interesting too. I mean, I just thinking too, because we've had some historical, really rich historical conversations today about, you know, in some of the sort of history of science communication, you know, it's somewhat recent in that history for scientists to have a cultural and political context that would make them so very guarded. And part of it has to do to some extent. And I. This predates social media and virality of information and counter information and so on.

[Ellen Horn]

And.

[Alison Carruth]

But I think also in a way there's a fraught relationship between modern science journalism and scientific knowledge production because the risk of having your paper in nature make a headline and then turn out to need a correction or to be wrong. So I'm thinking about that and what's so interesting about this moment, that this is so beautifully illustrating and embodying and painfully so for Covid, it was fast moving, super collaborative science. And a lot has been written about the fact that all of the usual barriers, the competition to be first to publish, you know, sort of institutions, biomedical research institutions, like at the time I own ucla, that would have been, you know, in stiff competition, had long mous about collaboration that all went out the window.

[Ellen Horn]

Right.

[Alison Carruth]

And also it was the clinicians who were like really the experts. So I mean, this to me is a really incredible case study. I mean, one of the things that we talk about a lot is that we try in our work across these different media and very much in audio, to think about both scientific knowledge and science, scientists as people, as part of other communities and not only scientific ones. But also to make room for skepticism. Right. And that is not the same actually. We had a reviewer on an academic paper that'll be coming out in the summer, say, well, are you platforming climate denialism? I'm like, well, first of all, we don't have a million people by which we could platform such a thing. But in any case, that's not. No. Right. But why can't we sort of imagine that there's not just fact based evidence based human reporting that leans heavily on science and then something else that is. Right, not that. So that's one piece and this really I'll share. Maybe this is a good moment for one of our clips. So this is just array of kind of some of our main projects. And it's the quad on the right that actually the three archival ecologies Carried by Water, Mining for the Climate that are audio documentary series Carried by Water and Mining for the Climate have had two seasons come out in different locations. Like say a bit more about that. Archival Ecologies is in post production for the second season. That lower right image is from a wonderful recent PhD in English grad from Princeton who's about to start a postdoc at Harvard in the environmental studies. This was her dispatches. These are basically parts of the dissertation research that didn't fit into the academic form and in which she wrote these beautiful sort of logs, these photo essays. And then there was this other piece on the Meadowlands I mentioned that got picked up by the Atlantic. On the other side are projects like, well, Outside Audio. So California on the Edge is the documentary feature film I mentioned. Chasing an End to Forever's about Forever Chemicals. It's a documentary short we're working on with scientists and engineers here. And then these other projects, a photographic project that is by Baron that was first published in High Country News and then a pop up art project. So just wanting to show you the range. And so science and scientific sort of figures have really different places in each of these. And archival Ecologies I think is an interesting example. So this was helmed by Jamie Collins, who is a postdoctoral fellow here at Princeton for three years and worked with us the whole time. She's a scholar of ecopoetics and also like a really extraordinary archival researcher and thinker about archives. Archival Ecologies is the title of her her book in progress, which will be a second book project. She's now doing a public humanities postdoc at Northwestern. And this is the audio project that she has developed. And each season ties to one chapter of this book project. The first One fire. And Lytton is actually about a fire, a devastating wildfire that hit Lytton in British Columbia, this small town in the nearby First Nation Reserve, very close to where Jamie grew up in Canada. And Jamie and two undergraduate interns, students here at Princeton, went to Lytton for about Vancouver and Lynton for about three weeks two summers after the fire. One of the things that immediately became apparent was the fact that the climate scientists, mostly out of University of British Columbia, they knew there was a strong climate change signal in this fire. But what the community knew, both the Indigenous, the First Nation community and the community in Linton knew, was that the railroad had long not been neglecting their above ground electrical infrastructure. And they knew were actually the catalyst. And so there was this huge conflict about like, what caused the fire and on whose knowledge and expertise were we going to base that determination? But this show is really about what happens to cultural collections when there are these ecological and climatic upheavals and what does it look like to salvage, recover or restore them. So there's these sort of two different levels. And I'll just play a clip because one of the things that I think Jamie really, I mean, the aesthetics of audio have been really important to Jamie in this project. And I just wanted you to hear a bit of that because we start not with the scientists who became an important interlocutor in Vancouver, but with one of the First Nation leaders who was leading a kind of ritual that Jamie was able to record.

[Narrator for Audio Clips]

Just before blessing the ground, the community held a prayer walk through town. We passed empty lots close, closed off by blue wire fences. Two years after the fire in Lytton, nothing has been rebuilt. There's some debris, but most lots have been cleaned, exposing just a concrete foundation or a hole where a building used to be. Only a few details indicate there was a fire. Charred trees and lamppost shades that look like melted candles. It took 10 minutes to reach the end of Main street, where around 60 people have gathered on a gravel site for speeches and prayers.

[Alison Carruth]

And then just by way of comparison, then we can kind of continue the conversation. I think I'll just play this clip from Carried by Water. So this first season was a retrospective exploration of super typhoon Haiyan. And we released the first episode on the exact 10 year anniversary of the super typhoon Haiyan, known as Yolanda locally in the Philippines. This was led by Mario Soriano, who is a groundwater modeler and a hydrologist who was a postdoc here for three years and now on faculty in geography at Nus and Singapore and. And he is from Manila. He was in Manila, completing his undergraduate degree when this typhoon hit the central Philippines, touching landfall in a place called Giwon and Tacloban. He went there for a month with a graduate student, architecture, who's Filipino American, and an undergraduate student who had never been to the Philippines. And in the course of their work there to build the kind of sort of story, and they probably interviewed over three dozen people. Those range from scientists in the National Weather Service of the Philippines, which is pagasa, to locals on the ground in Guiwon who were reflecting on the fact that the reason so many community members did not evacuate is the scientific community, internationally and nationally, would not call what was coming a tsunami because it wasn't, technically speaking, it was a typhoon that was going to produce a tsunami like wave. But because typhoons are so common in this part of the world, on the archipelago, and people sort of feel like we know what to do, we're not leaving. If the scientific community had been able to just bend their scientific right sort of vocabulary to say what is coming is a tsunami, or at least like a tsunami, we now know a lot more people would have evacuated. So this was sort of one of the cruxes that that was being explored.

[Philippine Meteorologist]

If we called it a tsunami the night before Yolanda made its impact, we could have killed people. But because the actions or the response to a tsunami is different from the response to a storm surge hazard. Storm surge hazards, you have time to move away. Tsunamis might create panic and then a stampede. And we didn't like to do that. So we retained the term storm surge, which unfortunately was not as well known as a tsunami. We had to stick with the science because we feared that we didn't want to kill people by calling it a tsunami.

[Alison Carruth]

So what I find so remarkable about this moment is like, on the one hand, yeah, I mean, fair enough, right? Like, you're working with this fast moving, what's going to prove to be the most catastrophic typhoon to hit the central Philippines on record by that, at that point. And the risk, right. So much is unknown. And Only in hindsight, 10 years later, is the scientific community beginning to reckon with this challenge.

[Ellen Horn]

So, yeah, I want to loop back to you. Had asked about kind of funders at the beginning of Radiolab, and I think about a meeting that I had at the Sloan foundation really early on, where we were pitching the idea of the show as integrating science into the rest of the world. Like, so much of what science funders do is fund, you know, for the Public dissemination of knowledge is like allow you to speak within your community. And so the case that we were just making was to sort of like, let's try to mainstream this to hit people who aren't interested in science or who like dropped out of science at the Krebs cycle in elementary school. School or middle school or whatever. Right. Who think that this isn't the kind of thing that they're into. And I have subsequently heard, you know, Doran Weber from the Sloan foundation sort of proudly take ownership for Radiolab, that he was able to make that possible. You know, I think it's like a great case for impact for them certainly. And you know, now I first started working on episodes in 2003. There's sometimes things air that I worked on 10, 20 years ago. I've met people who now have PhDs because they were inspired by Radiolab episodes. So it's been really kind of incredible. Obviously the funding environment is super challenging, but there is currently an NSF informal science communication. There are ways, pathways to money right now from NSF to do this kind of work. And I think there's huge opportunities there.

[Alison Carruth]

Just as a footnote on Sloan, I mean, one of the things that I find really remarkable at Sloan is they made a decision not to fund feature length documentary. They fund episodic television, fiction, film and audio. And I think that's as well as book projects that intend to have public impact, that are research based and driven. And I think that I actually really appreciate that there are folks, Sundance, Redford, Other Doc Society and so on that are funding feature length films and often don't fund these other forms. So just that's a footnote because I, I think one of the projects they funded early on was what became hidden figures. To me, that's really powerful to think about how this form, and maybe this is a place for us to just talk about audio and its affordances, both the conversation, the dialogic and also the documentary or narrative styles. The idea that this form might actually be able over the long run to inspire people to come into the sciences who may not otherwise have seen themselves there. I think it's interesting about how audio versus is documentary film might do that differently.

[Narrator for Audio Clips]

Right?

[Alison Carruth]

I mean, you know, one of the things with our documentary film project that's been something we've really focused on is building relationships with early career scientists, women scientists. They have interestingly been willing, with the time that we've had to build the rapport and the relationship to let us into like more of their life and their thinking and their doubts. Like one marine scientist who sort of took us out of the lab because didn't want the early career folks, this is a senior person. To hear her say, it's all happening in the ocean so much faster than I thought. And she just wanted to share the grief, you know. But then with documentary film it's like, but I'm going to be on camera. Right. And like there's this, there's this different kind of vulnerability to that. Yeah. So I mean, what do you see as the affordances of audio for this work?

[Ellen Horn]

I mean, Chandra puts it really, really well. Like a microphone can go places that cameras really can. And I think people get a level of comfort in a recorded conversation with just being themselves and taking the time that's necessary and allowing themselves to have emotion and be real people and all of that in a way that's very hard to do. And documentary fell can be done and absolutely can be done beautifully and successfully there. But there's also of course, the differences in the way that we take in as audience members, as we take in take in the projects. And I think that the fact that the industrial product, the podcast, has ad supported sales and all of that and maybe moving to television and YouTube because of enhanced reach and ad rates and all of that doesn't change the fact that there's still a large substantial audience that is interested in audio only work and can connect deeply with audio only work. I think it's really a question around funding models and how do you actually get the support to make this kind of work?

[Alison Carruth]

I mean, maybe while we're on that thread and then we were going to maybe talk briefly, but I think we probably want to open up about how we sort of other projects and shows that we admire that we sort of see out there on the landscape. But it's interesting. I mean, I think one of the things about what we're doing is that's unique is like here we sit at Princeton. And so we benefited from seed funding early on and in a way, and because of both the funding model we have, which I think is kind of unique, and also because of the time that we're afforded to do this kind of work, we've been able to send teams, do field reporting and to be on site, on location in the field for two weeks, three weeks a month, that's really unique, I think about that. But of course we also don't have the same reach.

[Narrator for Audio Clips]

Right.

[Alison Carruth]

Yeah. As a radio lab, for example, or Science Friday, et cetera. And one of the things when we started with audio. Part of it was like, what if in the early days of this experiment of Blue Lab, what if we all are working in a single medium together and learn and we're new to it, to different degrees and we actually brought in as consulting producers and mentors an audio journalism team in Philly, Kvinda Media. They have an extreme extraordinary podcast called Obscured that I could not recommend enough. For me, one of the things that's been really like rewarding is to be, to be a novice learning alongside undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, and then working with these really seasoned journalists and documentarians. So that's something I'd share.

[Ellen Horn]

You're prompt about talking about what other people are doing. I we're very lucky to have Blythe Terrell. Does anyone know Blythe in here who works at Science Versus? She helps at nyu and she sent me this lovely note knowing that I was going to be here today to share with you guys about some of the stuff that they're doing. I'll just read a little bit of this. She says Science Versus has been in a years long partnership with a sexual health lab at Queen's University in Canada that has led to several peer reviewed published academic academic papers. How it started. They were working on episodes about blue balls, the orgasm gap, libido and sex and found that there wasn't much as much research as they'd hoped. And so they did this informal listener survey and then got thousands of responses and then they were like, what do we do with this information? And so they built a partnership with an academic. I just like such a cool model and what a great idea. And like you say you don't have the audience here, but there are places that do have the audience that want scholarly expertise and are always looking for experts. Right. That there are perhaps some of these partnerships that can actually yield results for both parties.

[Alison Carruth]

Yeah, I love that vignette. Yeah. When we started out, Jamie, who I mentioned earlier of archival ecology, she actually sort of speaks, started this listening club for the community here, broader than sort of our core team. And we just started listening really voraciously to all kinds, strictly in the audio form. And two things came out of that. I mean it was really interesting. Everything from like these really long standing programs like Science Friday or Hidden Brain. Right. To these more indie and idiosyncratic ologies. There's this podcast that Vox has been producing called Unexplainable. There's drilled, which of course is like, you know, true crime meets climate. Yeah, right. And then there's one that like I now teach in my environmental media lecture course here which is called Floodlines. And this was a production of the Atlantic. And to me it remains like a North Star. And it remains North Star because it is actually when you really spend a lot of time. I think I've listened to the episodes like six times over at this point over a period of several years. And there is this kind of like substructure of scientific research, but also it is threaded with this community knowledge and this testimony. Right. And part of it is the end of this where the former FEMA head, right, who was FEMA head at the time and one of the main participants in this series, there's basically an indirect kind of exchange mediated by the host. And it is, you know, to me it's such a powerful model like of it is very fact based from the historical material. We start on last island with a 19th century hurricane that probably would be a Cat 5 today. I mean so research based, so much archival material. But then at the end of the day the community knowledge, right. Is actually handled so deftly. So I mean that in all of the things we listened to that year, that one kind of stood out.

[Ellen Horn]

I mean, yeah, if you haven't listened to that one, it's like give a shout out to like the scoring. The care that they take with me,

[Alison Carruth]

which Christian Scott was part.

[Ellen Horn]

Yeah, yeah. An all original score. Yeah. It's really like it's made with this level of care that you, you know, might see in cinema or in literature. It's like really feels like this well crafted thing. And I think that that's the like I just want to give another kind of plug to the well crafted, time consuming, you know, soul crushing labor of making something that can last. Exactly. And be a document into the future. And be.

[Alison Carruth]

That's right. Yeah. And I have students, I mean it's 10 hours plus or minus to listen to the entire right. Series and I also have now students listen to an entire album and the first thing they ask is how. How do I actually listen to an album from track one to track 11. How do I listen to an entire right. Audio documentary series from episode one to episode nine? So anyways, I think too right like that this like, you know, attention that is required to engage with this kind of, you know, it's much more than even a right feature length documentary film.

[Ellen Horn]

What do you tell them about?

[Alison Carruth]

What do I tell them? I show them. I screen share like sports, Spotify or Apple podcasts and show them how you go to an album. Do not Let the algorithm turn off the shuffle. Turn off the algorithm that's gonna kick you into some. What it thinks you want to listen to next. Because it'll shuffle if they can get to the album, then it'll often be in a shuffle mode.

[Ellen Horn]

Right.

[Alison Carruth]

So anyways, good experience.

[Ellen Horn]

Gosh. Where my head went was like talking about techniques for, you know, putting on your headphones, putting your phone away, using. And walking or doing something that gets you in your body and away from the possibility of like, using.

[Alison Carruth]

Distract.

[Ellen Horn]

Distracting yourself. Yeah.

[Alison Carruth]

Should we open?

[Panel Participant]

Yeah.

[Ellen Horn]

I'm very curious about who is in the room and what brought you here.

[Alison Carruth]

I know. Me too. Very much so.

[Ryan Shinkle]

I smelled food.

[Alison Carruth]

There's a scientist who will tell you how that worked on your brain to come here.

[Ryan Shinkle]

Hi. Hello. Ryan Shinkle, James Madison Program. I run a podcast in the politics department. And can everyone hear me?

[Alison Carruth]

Yes.

[Ryan Shinkle]

And we focus a lot on civics, American history, the Constitution, but also just the humanities more generally.

[Panel Participant]

Sometimes.

[Ryan Shinkle]

Sometimes the arts, but rarely have we gotten into the sciences. And it's an interview format, so a tiny bit of banter, but mostly an author with a new book. And I'm wondering what is a good way that you would recommend for someone in the humanities, sort of the two cultures kind of problem, if they want to try and branch out into. And have someone on to talk about science without. If someone doesn't have. If the host doesn't have the technical expertise, unfortunately. How do you translate that for the audience in a way that makes it accessible and entertaining?

[Ellen Horn]

Well, you make a podcast, so it's edited.

[Narrator for Audio Clips]

Right.

[Ellen Horn]

I would recommend a really long conversation with someone that you're curious about or like, work that you are curious about in the science. It's not the host's job to explain it. It's the host's job to be curious. And so start there.

[Alison Carruth]

I actually really. This. This podcast I mentioned that Vox is producing called Unexplainable, might be an interesting thing for you to dip into because one of the things they're doing is actually taking listeners to corners of the scientific world that are, like, just not making the mainstream science press. And they're really tackling some, oftentimes some super technical stuff. There was an episode on Dark Oxygen and the, you know, Mariana's Trench in the Clarion Clipperton Zone. And, you know, I mean, this is like, heady technical stuff. And they're finding a way to really. And often they are going to younger scientists on the team. So that's part of why I've been listening a lot to it. So that to me is like one to look at. But I also think it's true that it's sort of the chemistry of both a scientist who is curious about what you're doing. Right. Curious to kind of be in that setting and also to have to do research. I mean, I do think like I read scientific papers, like voraciously. I don't. I can't read down into the statistical analyses, but I can read the openers. So it is also about having primers so that you're entering that conversation curious but also equipped. So that would be something else I'd offer. Yeah.

[Ellen Horn]

One of the other things I'll say is Science versus is a show that does footnotes. So they include all of their sources for their research. I wish that were a common practice everywhere. But it's a. It's a good place to look.

[Panel Participant]

That's amazing. Thanks for that. So excited to hear some of these shows. I want to ask you the same question you asked in the first session. How are you thinking about audience because. And maybe to hone in on specifics. So you started Blue Labs five years ago?

[Alison Carruth]

Yeah, five years ago. But we really got going in ours four years ago.

[Panel Participant]

Yeah. So how that question's evolved, like what you maybe thought the answer was four years ago and now how you're thinking about it today.

[Alison Carruth]

And I wish Baron were here because, you know, we're a couple in life and in work. But it's also like he is an environmental documentary photographer, filmmaker, you know, as well as a writer and designer and, you know, and you know, an artist. And I am, you know, an academic first and foremost. And so like, there's also like, as we co lead in this thing, a really productive push and pull about how we think about that and also the forms that we're trying to do this experiment in. What I can say is for the three audio projects we, you know, distributed over Podbean, they're like streaming in all the places. And we've as of like last night count, we have about 8,800 listens across those three projects, you know, which would, you know, at NPR would not like, you know, pass semester. I mean, throughline we had them, the producers there come and do a workshop with our group and I'm there apparently, you know, million listeners now, one of the most popular syndicated podcasts that NPR has, this wonderful history podcast. But for a lot of our team, right, who are, whose other work is taking the form of academic papers, conference posters, monographs and so on, you know, 5,000 listens for the mind of the. That's an impact. Right. What has also been meaningful to us is to really get local about that. So it means a lot to Mario and that team that 50% of those listeners have been in the Philippines. And we can see that.

[Ellen Horn]

Right.

[Alison Carruth]

I didn't talk about this project, Mining for the Climate, which is actually an exploration of lithium mining in the US and environmental justice and other forms of opposition to it that are local in North Carolina, Nevada. But for the first season we had so many North Carolina listeners, the North Carolina NPR station interviewed the team that felt really meaningful. So I think we're trying to have sort of micro publics and then sort of fellow travelers in academia.

[Narrator for Audio Clips]

Right.

[Alison Carruth]

That's, I think, how we think about the audiences for these particular projects. The Daiquiri film is a different thing. Like, you know, that's something that we're, you know, we're going to more. We just applied for a Sundance grant. We're imagining that will get applied to festivals. So that that's a different model.

[Panel Moderator or Participant]

Yeah.

[Panel Participant]

So I thank you both so much. That was really interesting discussion. I have a question and about Radiolab and specifically how you approach the. Have approached the various topics that you broached. I remember this one episode in particular in 2013, I think it was called Blame. And I remember that episode because I think I was 15 or 16 years old when I listened to it, and it was on a very controversial topic, which was people that do terrible things that might not necessarily be blameworthy for it. And I think it was such a, it was such an important thing for me to listen to at that age because I felt oftentimes like in high school, you know, they would handle us a bit with kid gloves. They didn't want to expose us to, you know, difficult topics. And I was wondering how you approached or thought about approaching really challenging topics. You know, what strategies you use to talk about difficult issues, bring in the right people without necessarily, you know, avoiding also the, you know, the consequences of those conversations too.

[Ellen Horn]

Great question. Boy. I'm thinking of some learning that we had at Radiolab where we didn't consult the right people or get the right feedback before things came out, frankly, which encouraged us to try to see around our blind spots a little bit more and invite more people into the process. There became. I can't, I'm like, totally stuck on because I think if I'm remembering the right episode that it had, there's like a man whose son is or daughter is murdered horribly and then ends up like, forgiving The. Yeah, it's that episode. Right. All I can remember as we're talking about this is how much time we spent in the editorial room talking about pedophiles and how we want. There was a producer in particular who really wanted to do something about, like, that felt like the third rail of, like, no one wants to listen to a pedophile empathetically, can we do it? And we didn't figure out how to do it. So it's funny, I carry these kind of, like, losses with me from that editorial process, but they're really successes in some ways, right. Where you're like, actually, sometimes the best thing you can do is kill a story. Where you're like, maybe we aren't the people to tell this. We don't need to weigh in on this thing. Right. We don't have enough clarity of, like, what our editorial purpose is here. And maybe it's something that we sort of keep in the incubator and try and figure out a way to get to eventually. We did sometimes pay outside folks to listen to things. We always invited lots of people into the. Into the editorial meetings to come give feedback. And, you know, sometimes that. That became kind of formalized. That's not to say we didn't make a ton of mistakes while I was there. We definitely did. And I think that's, you know, that's. That's part of it, like trying to figure out then how to. How to move forward and get enough feedback from your. From people who are impacted by your storytelling and. Yeah,

[Panel Participant]

that was such a great question. I'm almost embarrassed to ask mine now because it's just about money, about funding, so kind of. But practical, I guess.

So.

Most of the higher ed education podcasters that I've spoken to, it's kind of the side of their desk thing that they do. It's a side project or there's basically zero funding around that. And so you'd mention around work with Radiolab, with foundations and things, obviously much bigger project than most things. But what are some of the things you've seen within science podcasting, I guess, of how people have been able to fund that, to actually make a great podcast.

[Alison Carruth]

Take that first.

[Ellen Horn]

Yeah, I mean, I only really know from the public radio place, which there have been a number of funders, but mainly the National Science foundation and the informal science. Oh, actually I'm like, you know all about this too. Maybe you can speak to it. Yeah, the NSF AISL Fund is really a great program, and they are giving away money, like, right now. Before the end of the year with like letter. I think it's like, it's the 15th is like they. They need a letter of inquiry, but there's money that, you know, essentially a lot got shut down. And now it's seems that there are opportunities coming back. But there's Simons Foundation, Templeton. Templeton is really interested in these kind of like, big ideas and places where science meets larger questions and. Yeah, happy to talk more about it.

[Panel Participant]

I just wanted to say, one quick note was when you. When you mentioned the thing about the editorial space where you were discussing that, as somebody who's been gone through many times, the peer review process, it was weird going through peer review where I would send the thing out, wait six months, somebody would come back. It was not a lot of exchange. And then being in radio, which was supposedly not scholarly, and having these deep, robust conversations about issues, I just wanted to say it was interesting. The second thing, but the question I have is about a sort of research protection in science and what is made possible by podcasts. That's more difficult because one of the things that pushed me into this kind of more into journalism was I was studying social movements and what I would have to go through to be able to record someone, to think about sharing it and let it do the things it needed to do in the world or even keep it as oral history. Right. I remember, you know, the irb, they're like, when are you going to destroy this? You know, I'm like, I'm not taking blood. I'm trying to. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, and like. So whereas then, you know, journalists would just be like, yeah, what we do is we just. This is maybe a bad thing to confess, but I'm just gonna say I remember taking a workshop with Rob Rosenthal and he said, here's what you do. You look at the person, you start walking toward them. You do not ask them if you can talk to them. You just ask them the question, and then they will consent by answering or walking away. You know, if they start to walk away, don't chase them. You know what I mean? These are very clear. Well, what's possible about. I mean, how have you experienced in science, though? Like, are there ways where these. This. This incredible work you're doing is able to circulate differently, you know, because it's in this form.

[Alison Carruth]

I mean. Well, maybe I'll start with the part because with IRB now being an elephant in the room. I mean, when we first started, bluelib had an IRB in place for the first three years because we were going to be. There was going to be academic publications that potentially and indeed did come. And now with the work we're doing, we have, for the moment, sort of unencumbered. And I really believe in the irb, its history. You know, we know where its histories come from. And at the same time. Right. It's a challenging to be at a research university, particularly one without a school of film and television. I'll say.

[Narrator for Audio Clips]

Right.

[Alison Carruth]

Is that, you know, the folks who are in those offices don't really know where to place this kind of work.

[State Farm Sponsor Voice]

Right.

[Alison Carruth]

And so I just. I will just say that it's an ongoing sort of negotiation, but we also separately came up with our own sort of ethical charter. Right. About consent, about participation, about co production of this work and each project that has looked different. Right. So that's something that I wanted to share. And I mean, that was particularly for mining for the climate and archival ecologies, which include indigenous participants like, you know, the irb, in fact, was insufficient. We felt. Right. For the kinds of ethical. That's right. The ethical protocols and also just the interpersonal dynamics and trust and so on and how. Anyways, so that's something I would say. I'm learning so much and I feel like this is just lifelong.

[Narrator for Audio Clips]

Right?

[Alison Carruth]

Yeah. And then with. Yeah, but for science, I mean, I mean, do you have thoughts about sort of.

[Ellen Horn]

I mean, I have complaints. I'm like, I do feel like there's something to be reworked here, Right. Where, like, I can't assess. I can think of so many conversations I've had with people where I'm like, I'm doing research about, you know, your own. I'm trying to learn about your sonic research that is recorded on tape. But you tell me you can't give me those recordings. Like, that does not make any sense to me. But then ultimately at Radiolab, we ended up basically trying to solve that by doing like, what we would call, like a theatrical present. Yeah. Recreation of it. And there was really. That was the only way we could do it. So, like, I'm thinking of this research that was around different languages and babies and the motherese of people, you know, the songs that mothers make to communicate with their babies. And that being something that exists across many languages. Like, I recruited people from Craigslist and I drove around neighborhoods where I had friends who knew people who had newborns, who spoke different languages to record, you know, women talking to babies, because I did not have access to those. To those recordings. But, yeah, it's I think is that

[Panel Participant]

reworkable, do you think like that like today?

[Ellen Horn]

I don't know what kind of conversation there is around irb. I mean I do think that some of those IRB concerns are really like legal cover your ass and don't have a like firm ethical basis.

[Alison Carruth]

But what's interesting is in the natural sciences, in like sort of field based natural sciences, there's often a lot of work that's happening that's not under an irb. Right. So it's like really is field dependent. Right. Like what field, field of science are we talking about? We're talking about immunology, you know, are we talking about. Right. Are we talking about anthropologists, you know, or. And so that's been in our work and interestingly, especially with the marine scientists who have been a really prominent group for California, this project California Edge, the film, you know, that has, it's actually not been coming up much. The generosity with which they have been, you know, sharing, inviting us in, allowing filming underwater in some cases, I mean, has really been noteworthy. So I think it's, you know, meanwhile we tried to do something involving some Woods Hole folks. That's the big, you know, Research Institute of Massachusetts. And they were those who were on, you know, who are federal employees. There were so many constraints. That's a different kind of constraint around scientific participation in these projects.

[Ellen Horn]

So yeah, I'm thinking there's some relationship between the like urgency and need to get public support too with the, with the research. Like, you know, folks who are doing climate issues, like they really want to reach the public and they are very willing to work with you.

[Starbucks Sponsor Voice]

I was surprised you got the doctor to talk to you because I have a book that came out last year on the pandemic in New York. We couldn't get anyone, we had very few people who would talk to us from the medical world because they had all been forced to sign NDAs.

[Ellen Horn]

Well, so let's be really clear. So Avere was our intern at Radiolab and so subsequently went to medical school and became a doctor. And so he was recording without permission on his phone. But it was a way of getting around hipaa. I mean those are the hardest places to get into, like hospitals. Even harder than the scientist's lab. Like so much harder.

[Philippine Meteorologist]

Right.

[Ellen Horn]

But like he was somebody who was in a great position to do that. And I do think that it's like in our communities we access people who might have some openness to bring the public with them.

[Alison Carruth]

All right, thank you.

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