Podcasting as methodology

We use podcasting both as a way of engaging with the communities we work with and as a way of sharing what we find.

For us, community-engaged research takes many forms: carrying out ethnographic research with cheesemakers and pastoralists, visiting farms, talking with people working across dairy systems, and interviewing experts. These encounters bring different kinds of knowledge into conversation — knowledge that may not ordinarily meet, despite being connected through the complex journeys milk makes from producer to consumer.

Archival research is part of this conversation too. When we uncover histories that still have consequences for people and communities today, we take those findings beyond the archive and share them with people connected to them. Their knowledge, memories and responses can open up new questions and change the direction of our research.

Not every conversation becomes part of a podcast episode or appears on this website. But each one informs how we follow milk: the connections we pursue, the assumptions we question and the histories we look at again. By bringing together knowledge that is often separated — between archives and everyday practice, producers and consumers, past and present — we hope to shed light on connections that can be missed when milk is understood only through one part of the system.

Podcasting allows us to share that process as well as its findings. It gives us space for voices, sounds, places and encounters that are difficult to convey through academic research alone, and makes the conversations shaping the project part of the way the research is communicated.