New CASS podcasts share academics’ personal stories and insights
Scholars from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences open up about their lives and make their case for how to approach the world differently in two new podcast series.
In This Academic’s Life, CASS academics discuss pivotal events and experiences that shaped their lives, careers and research. The first guest, Associate Professor Gavin Smith, fell into sociology at university, and he says that encountering the discipline was like “the lights going on” for him.
“It gave me such an appreciation of complexity,” he says. “It started to give me the language I was looking for, the currency I need, to engage with the kinds of things I encounter in my life.”
He adds: “My version of sociology is that you’re doing it because you believe in a social good. You believe in something that can be better than it currently is or historically has been and you’re able to connect those dots up.”
For the Scottish-born sociologist, getting into snake-catching was part of his passageway into being Australian and living in Australia, having been in his hometown of Aberdeen for 30 years.
His entrée into the dangerous endeavour also coincided with some personal challenges, which he describes in This Academic’s Life.
On the second CASS podcast Better Things, our academics offer insights on how to approach the world to live a better life. In the first episode, Screen Studies scholar Dr Katharina Bonzel from the ANU School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics talks about what mainstream movies can teach us.
Dr Bonzel, who generally watches movies 15 times to glean insights about the works for her work, says that she’s interested in analysing the films that “everybody watches”.
“I like them because they’re riveting because they reach so many people,” she says. “I want to see, if we have this critical mass, what do these films tell us about the world that we live in?”
Growing up, Dr Bonzel didn’t want to be Princess Leia. She wanted to be Han Solo.
“He gets to do the fun stuff: he gets to be the hero, he saves the day, and he gets to control the action in the films.”
From the Marvel superhero movies to Star Wars and the Alien films, Dr Bonzel discusses female role models in cinema, and how representations of heroines have changed over time. As someone who did her PhD on sports films, she also has a thing or two to say about the Rocky movies.
“Sylvester Stallone is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me,” she admits.
Subscribe to This Academic’s Life and Better Things on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes will be out every three weeks.