1. Introduction
Cripping is not a technical protocol and it does not always “work”. Where crip authorship meets media and technology, or publishing and the commodity version of authorship, it encounters the foundation of those tools and industries in the “ideology of ability” (Sievers 2008, 7). Moreover, authorship is durational and has phases (a term we prefer to stage) (…). (Mills and Sanchez Reference Mills and Sanchez2023)
As a disabled philosopher, I have been ‘cripping’ my scholarly praxis for years. Most of that work has consisted of more-or-less informal coping strategies to get things done when my bodymind refuses the norms of productivity: listening to audio versions of articles while lying in bed in the dark, experimenting with ‘coming out’ as disabled in the classroom, or insisting on working from home beyond the politically designated crisis time of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. However, once I discovered the trans-disciplinary movement of “disability as method,” I started interrogating the ways in which I framed my scholarly authorship, developing my individual experiential knowledge in dialogue with community-generated procedural knowledge. As Mills and Sanchez identify in the quote above, there is a foundational tension between the creative—and often positively inefficient—aspects of crip authorship and the ableism of dominant academic norms of linear productivity as the ability to publish prolifically. In the discipline of philosophy, for example, job security in an increasingly competitive market is largely determined by one’s ability to publish in a narrow set of top journals (Katzav Reference Katzav2018) and to produce multiple long-form monographs. I cannot completely escape these norms while remaining in academia, however, I can exercise crip refusal (Smilges Reference Smilges2023) by investing in alternative—and less gatekept—forms of publishing to not only transmit my knowledge, but also to develop it within a joyful practice through which I am recreated and resourced. I view scholarly podcasting, insofar as it is an act of crip refusal, to be part of the feminist killjoy philosopher ethos (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2024). By using podcasting as a research method, as a format to generate, analyse, and share knowledge, scholars can embody a “commitment to think what is unthought, what is turned into an assumption or presumption by the habits of everyday [academic] life” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2024, 148) to achieve a more just research culture. In this essay, I show how marginalized scholars can practice podcasting alongside (or in lieu of) traditional forms of scholarly publishing in ways that allow us to reconnect to our intellectual labor, to recreate ourselves as knowers and knowledge brokers by deliberately choosing to adopt a playful attitude in our work. While I center disabled people and crip theory in my analysis, I operate from an intersectional feminist position that understands that the need for recreational scholarship is motivated by the interconnected gender, class, race, and disability oppression. Troubling the boundary between work and leisure to resist life under late-stage capitalism in a small yet concrete way, I advocate for recreational scholarship as part of what makes research labor in the neoliberal university more sustainable.
I argue that podcasting, that is, the processes of podcast creation, production, and distribution, can be a site of recreational scholarship praxis generally and, specifically, a site of philosophy of disability. Using my own experience producing Massively Disabled (Gauthier-Mamaril Reference Gauthier-Mamaril2023), I identify three durational phases of authorship and explore them as sites for crip philosophy, that is, a philosophical praxis that uses knowledges of living as disabled, or cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer Reference Johnson and McRuer2014), as method. I draw a crip portrait of scholarly podcasting to critique the hegemonic nature of the norms of disciplinary philosophical practices that continue to exclude disabled philosophers (Tremain Reference Tremain2017; Flowers Reference Flowers2021; Moore Reference Moore2022) and that further debilitate current members of academe (Hamraie Reference Hamraie2016; Price Reference Price2024). From this portrait, I argue that podcasting should be adopted as a form of recreational scholarship. First, I define playful podcasting as a crip recreational scholarship praxis within the scope of contemporary calls to adopt a diverse “culture of praxis” (Dotson Reference Dotson2012) and in response to the narrowing of professionally recognized forms of philosophy (Zimmerman et al. Reference Zimmerman, Carter-Sowell and Xu2016; Katzav Reference Katzav2018; Chase and Reynolds Reference Chase and Reynolds2023; Donald Reference Donald2024). I argue that insisting on playful methods is a powerful way for disabled scholars to resist the epistemic domination of ableist academic structures that refuse to engage with our self-understanding (Lunau Reference Lunau2024; Bettcher Reference Bettcher2025). Although exploring Lunau’s concept of “epistemic domination” in relation to disability is beyond the scope of this paper, I bring it in to illuminate my choice of focusing on playfulness as an anti-assimilationist crip approach that recognizes the limits of disabled scholars seeking epistemic validation under the current system of academia. Second, I proceed to create a taxonomy of crip recreational scholarship through an analysis of the medium, the form, and the process of podcasts. I draw from the work of Maria Lugones on playfulness and “world”-traveling to explore the possibilities that arise when we work intentionally outside of the parameters of proving competence according to narrow, historically and culturally specific disciplinary criteria. When taken as a method, Lugones’s concept of “world”-traveling challenges us to approach and move through the status quo of exclusionary philosophy with playful purpose. I argue that scholarly podcasting that harnesses playfulness as method is an example of recreational scholarship that reinvigorates scholarly labor within the liminal space between institutional disciplinary norms of professionalism and creative praxis. Finally, to complement my analysis of Lugones, I explore Thi Nguyen’s idea of “striving play” and games as opportunities for us to exercise fluid agency. Whereas “world”-traveling involves some measure of agential fluidity, that is, of adapting and orienting our ways of acting through welcoming and hostile environments alike, it is not optional for marginalized knowers. Disabled scholars making their way in an ableist academic world do not get to choose whether or not they have to adapt. On the other hand, circumscribed spatiotemporal arenas of striving play, like games or podcasts that we have a hand in crafting and designing, can serve as a tool for purposeful world-travel training. I embrace the tense reality of agential determinism, and I conclude that podcasting, as part of an overall praxis, is a good example of the recreational scholarship that is needed to make professional philosophy more inclusive, and, frankly, sustainable.
1.1. Podcasting and playfulness: disability as method
“Disability as method” has been used since the 2010s (Mills and Sanchez Reference Mills and Sanchez2023) across disciplines as an umbrella term to denote the various ways in which living with or near disability shapes epistemic inquiry, world-building, and ethical considerations. In many ways, “disability as method” is cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer Reference Johnson and McRuer2014) presented through a more pragmatic lens. Rather than being treated as an object of study, disability becomes the mode of study, that is, the collective experiences of surviving an ableist world yield a generative framework through which the exclusionary and debilitating status quo of academic philosophy—and academic scholarship, writ large—can be challenged. In recent years, philosophy of disability has developed as a field (Barnes Reference Barnes2016; Tremain Reference Tremain2017; Cureton and Wasserman Reference Cureton and Wasserman2020; Stramondo Reference Stramondo2021; Kukla Reference Kukla2022; Tremain Reference Tremain2024), but its methods remain marginal in the professional landscape of philosophy. With practitioners with varied backgrounds ranging from metaphysics, social and political theory, queer theory to (critical) disability studies, literary studies and rhetoric, as well as from the philosophy of science and technology, philosophy of disability spawns interdisciplinary methods and epistemologies that are not intelligible to the twenty-first-century discipline. Since the 1960s, the top English-language philosophy journals have restricted their scope to prioritize a monoculture. From 1948 onwards, the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Mind had a sharp reduction in the diversity of the material they published (Katzav and Vaesen Reference Katzav and Vaesen2017a), setting up an exclusionary structure that prioritizes a “culture of justification,” “i.e. a culture that privileges legitimation according to presumed commonly-held, univocally relevant justifying norms, which serves to amplify already existing practices of exceptionalism and senses of incongruence within the profession” (Dotson Reference Dotson2012).
This kind of culture thrives on gatekeeping, and it is very effective at it. The peer review system alone perpetuates a partisan chokehold on who gets admitted into the hallowed halls of the discipline (Katzav and Vaesen Reference Katzav and Vaesen2017b), effectively entrenching dogmatism. If these words make me sound bitter, that is a correct, if incomplete, assessment of the emotionality of the text (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014). The concept of recreational scholarship is shaped by the complex interplay of personal, social, and intellectual experiences. I offer it, not out of animus towards the university, but out of love and care for marginalized scholars whose work overflows the bounds of current disciplinary norms. A feminist killjoy truth is that “those who are not ‘at home’ in categories tend to know more about them” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2024,141). Scholarly podcasting, because of the intimacy of the audio medium that listeners intentionally choose to beam directly into their ears (Benjamin Thompson, in Cook Reference Cook2023, 9), gives us the opportunity to create an academic “third space”; for, as feminist studies and trans philosophy scholar Amy Marvin puts it,
We are at our best when we don’t let this discipline make us too defensive, when we’re having good conversations with friends over coffee, and when we don’t get too hung up on establishing this thing we’re doing as “real philosophy” (which is a losing game).
(Marvin Reference Marvin2024,10)
Of course, podcasting is not in-and-of-itself cripistemological or a feminist killjoy act. Like any other medium, or techne, it can be used for multiple ends and in a variety of ways. However, I argue that it can be wielded cripistemologically to orient and deploy knowledge developed from surviving an ableist world, regardless of whether the podcaster is disabled or not. Marginalized scholars are used to working under epistemic domination, wherein knowledge from their self-understanding is not legitimated by the dominating epistemic culture (Lunau Reference Lunau2024; Bettcher Reference Bettcher2025). By using one’s voice, literally and not through a written text, to directly engage with listeners as they go about their lives, podcasters can “drive a wedge into the door of the ivory tower and help pry it open for people who are not so amenable to the hegemony of the written word” (Lori Beckstead, in Cook Reference Cook2023, 27). From a listener’s perspective, audio content is often easier to consume, and those who need to read a transcript are also exposed to oral speech patterns. From a podcaster’s perspective, having the opportunity to speak outside of the disciplinary nature of traditional academic or even literary formats can be extremely freeing, allowing them to dream up a different future for generous scholarship. As a practice of crip authorship, podcasting allows us to engage with what Tobin Sievers calls the “ideology of ability” by deconstructing and critiquing the received norms around whose voice conveys knowledge or even, in the case of podcasts featuring non-speaking guests (Gray and Ratcliffe Reference Gray and Ratcliffe2022), the ways in which “acceptable voicing” is constructed to include or exclude disabled knowers from participating in the epistemic economy. Testimony from existing scholarly podcasters shows that it changes the scholarly habitus of those who thrive on collaborative, embodied, more freeform work “that forces us to rethink conventional ideas of knowledge and conventional ideas of learning” (Martin Spinelli, in Cook Reference Cook2023, 32). In technical terms, a podcast is an audio recording made available on the internet, usually as part of a series. It is possible to make only one file available and that is technically a podcast, but for my purposes a podcast necessarily involves seriality: it is episodic in process and form (Cook Reference Cook2023). What distinguishes a podcast from a public audio file is the creation of a temporal world, one that has its own order, builds its own references, and draws the listener in. As a durational artifact and an asynchronous form of communication, a podcast enshrines casual conversations by making them accessible to absent parties for scrutiny and analysis (Declercq et al. Reference Declercq, Dikomitis, Meinen, Schoendube, Shaughnessy and Vanhoof2025).
When we cross this definition with crip authorship, we encounter some of the usual frictions when discussing disabled living and productivity. After all, if one end product involves a multiplicity of outputs, that is not in and of itself subversive to the capitalist logics of neoliberal academia. A scholarly podcast is still, crucially, the product of a scholar’s labor and, as such, it exists within the remit of academic work. Producing a podcast is also not accessible to everyone and many may not prefer it to traditional written scholarship as a way to express and share their knowledge. Despite these reasonable objections, I contend that the podcasting process can be used to subvert neoliberal notions of efficiency and productivity, namely by cultivating an attitude of playfulness in our work and elevating the procedural, the behind-the-scenes of researching, to the level of the final product. Therefore, while podcasting as academics does not eschew the logic of productivity completely, as a purposefully playful process it offers us the possibility to crip authorship by refusing to perform a certain kind of professional competence and, subsequently, to resist disciplinary norms by practicing crip recreational scholarship. This practice refers to a method rather than the specific content of any academic work. To be recreational, scholarship must prioritize playfulness, and its accompanying opportunities for creativity, over the norms of professionalism and epistemic transparency about the research process over the performance of competence. This does not mean that no curation is involved; rather, it means consciously setting aside or even transgressing the rules around only presenting finished, polished work to the public, or only citing and engaging in dialogue with sources and knowers that have been legitimated by the academy. Crip recreational scholarship remains a performance of epistemic authority, but it intentionally chooses different scene partners on new and various stages as a kind of performance art. This kind of epistemic authority is a form of “hacking” (Hamraie and Fritsch Reference Hamraie and Fritsch2019) that disabled people excel in by necessity. Where wheelchair users, tired of waiting for urban planning policies to address the need for curb cuts, take to the streets with sledgehammers, a podcaster can crip expertise by disregarding academic hierarchies to platform marginalized guests. For the purposes of this essay I refer to podcasting as a potential site of recreational scholarship, but I do not present it as the only, or even the ultimate, example. I hope others will investigate more sites and report back. While there is emerging scholarship on the impact of podcasting-as-care on listeners (Zokaei Reference Zokaei2024), this paper focuses on podcasting as an insurgent and transformative practice for the academic producer (Cook Reference Cook2023).
To be purposefully playful is to approach an activity playfully, even when it is not a game. This playful approach should not be equated with flippancy, but it is unserious in a rebellious way because it challenges naturalised rules of engagement. In her seminal work Playfulness, “world”-traveling, and loving perception, Maria Lugones takes to task what she refers to as “agonistic play” (Lugones Reference Lugones1987), a hermeneutic framework that can be applied to the “culture of justification” in mainstream academic philosophy (Dotson Reference Dotson2012) and its zero-sum framing of philosophical argumentation. Lugones critiques Gadamer (Reference Gadamer1975) and Huizinga’s (Reference Huizinga1968) concept of play as competition, strain, or argumentation:
An agonistic sense of playfulness is one in which competence is supreme. You better know the rules of the game. In agonistic play there is risk, there is uncertainty, but the uncertainty is about who is going to win and who is going to lose. There are rules that inspire hostility. The attitude of playfulness is conceived as secondary to or derived from play. Since play is agon, then the only conceivable playful attitude is an agonistic one (the attitude does not turn an activity into play, but rather presupposes an activity that is play). (Lugones Reference Lugones1987, 25)
In other words, scholarship is work, not play; therefore, it must be approached seriously by managing risk and uncertainty and by demonstrating competence (Jones Reference Jones2020). Professionalism in academia may not be seen as a playful matter, but it does involve performing competence according to specific rules, and these rules “inspire hostility” (Lugones Reference Lugones1987, 25).
This understanding of play is inimical to “world”-traveling for Lugones, to loving and non-arrogant epistemic bridging between individuals and communities. “The agonistic traveller is a conqueror, an imperialist” (Reference Lugones1987, 25), declares Lugones, thus drawing a clear analogy between argumentative play and a violent colonial praxis. If we, as philosophers, as academics, are to play the role of knowledge brokers in our public-facing work, it matters how we go about it. I am indebted to Peter Keogh for introducing me to this turn of phrase (knowledge brokers) that efficiently resituates the epistemic role of academicians who engage with broader communities of knowledge. To broker knowledge is to act as an interpreter or a facilitator between different epistemic parties. Anyone who purports to share their research with non-specialist audiences has the responsibility to act as a knowledge broker, not just a knowledge-giver, if we are to be accountable to our broader communities.
Whereas rigorous analytical combing has its place in peer-reviewing articles for expert journals, there are certain in-group behaviors that display arrogance when exported into a more heterogeneous environment. While communicating philosophy for a “lay audience” is a practice as ancient as philosophizing itself, it has not always been taken seriously as part of a professional practice; counterintuitively, that is exactly why using the framework of playfulness is so generative when we consider the scholarly podcast. Lugones exhorts us to approach life playfully and not just play with activities that we see as “games.” This, in turn, encouraged me to use Nguyen’s idea of “striving play” in my analysis of podcasting as playful philosophical praxis. Applying Lugones’s idea of playfulness to the case study of a scholarly podcast production, I will examine the concepts of competence, argumentation, and uncertainty as they relate both to the disciplinary practice of philosophy in general and themes in philosophy of disability in particular.
2. Phase 1: Medium/challenging competence
Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight. (Lugones Reference Lugones1987, 17)
The combattive, argumentative style of debate was never what appealed to me in philosophy. It was the intimate conversations, the collaborative folding and unfolding of ideas, the stoking of affects that spurred me to pursue the life of a professional theorist. This is not to say that I have not been schooled in the art of argumentation; however, both my iconoclastic historically rooted and context-forward “continental” education and my temperament have steered me toward a conversational kind of philosophical practice. I count Descartes’s Meditations and Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals as part of “conversational philosophy,” yet only the former is systematically recognized as a philosophical text. Throughout history certain ways of engaging philosophically have been sidelined or rejected as philosophy was disciplined, as part of the European university of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, to closely align itself with the scientific method (Droge Reference Droge2022). As a result, the contemporary discipline of philosophy is ill-equipped to manage the rich diversity of traditions within it as it imposes a form of epistemic domination on non-normative work (Jones Reference Jones2020; Lunau Reference Lunau2024; Bettcher Reference Bettcher2025). Different philosophical cultures continue to persist, albeit at the margins—not in the three top-tier high-impact journals and, sometimes, not in English. Through the concept of playfulness, spun from Lugones to crip theory via Mich Ciurria (Reference Ciurria2022, Reference Ciurria2023), I will demonstrate how podcasting, as a medium and philosophical praxis, can challenge the hegemonic seriousness of disciplinary philosophy.
One way podcasting can trouble the academic practice of philosophy is by challenging our idea of competence. Competence is of course not the sole province of philosophy. However, since the division of disciplines in the nineteenth century and the rise of analytic philosophy to dominance in the field, certain methods and practices have taken precedence over others when denoting professional competence (Akehurst Reference Akehurst2011; Bontekoe Reference Bontekoe2017). This, in turn, creates a disciplinary culture of striving for certain markers of quality, seriousness, and rigor. The shaping of a particular kind of competence does not happen in a vacuum; the evolution of neoliberal capitalism meant that increased efficiency and productivity became valued over all other things, and philosophy does not obviously produce anything that is directly marketable. It is therefore understandable how a culture of justification became the norm in philosophy, since justifying the continued existence of the discipline was always in the background of professional philosophical activity. However, from a cripistemological perspective, the logic of capitalism also creates eugenic structures that actively devalue the lives (including the epistemic cultures) of disabled people, whose very existences resist the demands of compulsory productivity. Disabled knowledges, or cripistemologies, exist under the epistemic domination of non-disabled people (and the capitalist epistemic systems they uphold) for whom their expressions of competence remain illegible (Piepzna-Samarasinha Reference Piepzna-Samarasinha2022; Lunau Reference Lunau2024; Bettcher Reference Bettcher2025). Knowing this, podcasters can crip the notion of competence by purposefully engaging in an experimental medium.
2.1. Experimentation and ethical questions
This is not to say that competence has nothing to do with podcasting. If you are in charge of all aspects of your podcast, as beginner podcasters often are, then production can seem extremely daunting. No matter how much you have trained yourself in public speaking at conferences or by giving lectures, speaking into a microphone, and listening back to your voice to edit does not come naturally to most of us. There is a certain intimacy and vulnerability that comes, not only with the sharing of the finished audio, but in the making of the episode. And this remains true even if you are not including your own voice or are doing the bare minimum of speaking on your podcast. When it comes to editing someone else’s speech, someone else’s verbal idiosyncrasies, meandering thoughts, and mouth sounds, “cutting and pasting” is not as straightforward as with the written word. We are negotiating closeness, or how we “touch” people, through the medium of sound (Cook Reference Cook2023). Therefore, even if you do not personally wield the technical skills involved in recording and editing the audio, you are still responsible for how the final product represents the voices involved. In short, many of the skills we have carefully honed as academics and as philosophers are being tested in uncanny avenues. Podcasting forces us to express the dissemination, creation, and analysis of knowledge in a witnessed embodied way that makes for a “richer, more discursive, more dialogic, more conversational experience” (Martin Spinelli, in Cook Reference Cook2023, 14). Not only do most philosophers have to learn new audio recording and editing skills to produce a podcast, but we must learn to navigate recruiting guests, questioning the ethics of platforming certain people, including members of the precariat for whom misspeaking on your show could affect their employability. Especially on unscripted shows, speaking “off the cuff” weighs differently on some speakers than on others. For non-native speakers, for people with speech impediments, or just people who need a moment to formulate their answers, participating in a podcast may mean exposing themselves “unprofessionally.” And for those of us who are extremely verbose with a penchant for blabbering, we can easily be accused of being dilettantes. But this is precisely why we should embrace the discomfort of scholarly podcasting (Humanities Podcast Network, dir, 2022). It is because of the myriad opportunities to flail that we should be podcasting as academics. It will not negate the reality of having to write grant applications, but it will offer a balance by providing a (third) space for open inquiry and the testing of unformed theories. There is always the risk of sterilizing this openness by trying to apply the constraints of professional philosophy on podcasting, but the medium lends itself to experimentation and varying levels of negotiated mutual vulnerability that might appear forced in other kinds of communications. As much as I have stressed the embodied nature of both the podcasting process and the podcast as a product, ultimately the goal is to witness to one another; to feel, not just conceive of, knowledge as relational, as always dynamic and in the making. The space of podcasting is a space we carve out to dedicate time and effort to an embodied relational epistemic practice.
Part of this relational practice involves reflecting on what we mean by “research ethics.” Many philosophers spend their whole careers never using or engaging with qualitative methods, but producing a scholarly podcast compels us to consider the parameters of knowledge co-production in a medium with little to no institutional or disciplinary guidelines. Those of us who have produced research podcasts quickly encountered the limits of existing research ethics processes when they are applied to a medium that does not operate according to traditional academic hierarchies and categories of “researcher” and “participant.” For example, podcast guests are generally not anonymous. They can use a pseudonym and it is possible to digitally alter their voice tracks to obscure their identity, but this is definitely not the norm. When one listens to a podcast, there is an assumption that all the speakers are willing to stand by their performances and receive due credit. This expectation is complicated in the realm of academic podcasting, especially if the guests are (a) classified—as disabled people are regardless of their capacity to provide informed consent—as “vulnerable” and/or (b) not an academic. Universities are not currently equipped to handle knowledge production that straddles the line with “public engagement” and therefore active work is required by podcasters to address the challenges of balancing power differentials, promoting epistemic justice, ensuring dynamic consent, and delivering epistemic accountability. In this sense, podcasting is a prime opportunity for critical ethical experimentation.
An argument for scholarly podcasting is that it can capture the “dilettante” yet joyful, sorrowful, and generative moments of research and idea production. It can offer a version of the conference coffee chat or the existential debates at the pub to a broader audience, sharing a sliver of the behind-the-scenes of institutional knowledge production. It can demystify the philosophical research process for “lay publics” outwith the culture of academia, but also for our colleagues inside and outside the discipline. By giving up a certain performance of competence and agreeing to share unfinished arguments in a convivial and intimate manner, we can give voice to a common yet mostly solitary experience for knowledge brokers. It is because podcasting is new to most of us and so different from our other forms of sharing outputs that we can be free to experiment with tone, sound design, levity, and so much more. In other words, we have more freedom to be playful and to refute a zero-sum framework of agonistic competency.
2.2. The costs of incompetence
Disabled people must navigate different worlds, too, including the serious worlds of medical testing and diagnosis, the welfare system, and educational centres for accessibility. These worlds require the utmost seriousness, as one “confesses” (to use Tremain’s language) to various disorders. A playful attitude could, and most likely will, result in denials of services. If you do not identify as “impaired” by virtue of an underlying “abnormality,” you are not, by legal definition, disabled. Using non-medical language to describe your circumstances—for example, saying that you are marginalized by a historically contingent apparatus of disability—will not help you secure disability benefits or services. (Ciurria Reference Ciurria2023)
It is important to remember that the performance of incompetence comes at a cost, especially for the marginalized. Therefore, I appeal to crip podcasting using Lugones’s concept of playfulness with the knowledge that this is risky for scholars whose experiences of disability, race, gender, and queerness leave them vulnerable to disciplinary action. However, I did mislead you with a citational sleight of hand by cherry-picking the quote above. In the rest of the blog post, Mich Ciurria is talking about the need for disabled people to reclaim a narrative of playfulness precisely because it is denied to us for survival reasons. If it is dangerous to play with competence in a clinical setting, we owe it to ourselves to find other avenues to experiment and test the boundaries of the concept. For Lugones, attending to competence means attending to an accepted way of doing things, a way of seeing the world, a way of operating. The performance of competence is made up of moves and rhythms that have a history, that perpetuate a cultural tradition. One is deemed competent if and only if one has acquired the specific skills that are considered appropriate by the rule-makers, those with legitimized epistemic authority. I argue that podcasting can be a way to disrupt this exclusionary logic of legitimation. In addition to acquiring technical skills when producing a podcast, there is an opportunity to position yourself with openness to the uncertainty of what your guests will say, to whatever you will discover as you investigate and research, and to how audiences will react to the show. Certainly, there are norms and accepted practices in podcasting, but because it is so much looser, I think it works with Lugones’s idea of challenging competence as a fixed, two-dimensional way of acting. Lugones critiques those who face uncertainty with “a fixed conception of him or herself” (Lugones Reference Lugones1987) and therefore perpetuate agonistic and imperialist practices that reinforce the shape of the fixed world they made.
3. Phase 2: Form/rules to manage uncertainty
The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. (Lugones Reference Lugones1987:16)
By practicing podcasting, we have the opportunity to craft and experiment with different rules to manage uncertainty. Regardless of your metaphysical commitments, you and I both have to account for the role of uncertainty in our lives. We all seek to find order because being completely ontologically and epistemically unmoored is not viable for human beings. Not only for the reasons of basic survival, but also to express our existence as beings of and in history. There are different approaches we might take to manage uncertainty: as discussed in the Introduction, we may view uncertainty as the source of risk and conclude that risk mitigation should aim to avoid the possibility of loss (of dominance, of status, of epistemic authority, etc.). But as we explored in Phase 1, we may also view uncertainty as a source of delight and ambiguity, as a challenging opportunity to discover new worlds and to exercise our agency in new, fluid ways. During Phase 2, let us focus on how the form of podcasting can help us cultivate approaching uncertainty as “an openness to surprise” and not as a threat. Following Lugones, I do not propose that we try to discover rules that would exhaustively explain the world. Rather, I adopt the metaphysical attitude according to which our “world”-traveling generates a diverse set of coexisting rules that allow for a multitude of expressions of agency. From a cripistemological standpoint, it is important that we learn to navigate a both/and relationship to uncertainty and ambiguity to develop practices to live that do not require eliminating all liminality. Instead of approaching uncertainty as an enemy to overcome, we can address it with curiosity as a morally neutral reality.
Podcasting is an opportunity to practice meeting uncertainty with playfulness because it allows us to experiment with how the constraints, or rules, of its form and cultural significance can offer us a spatiotemporal framework to act on our relationship to our own scholarship. In other words, beyond prompting us to reflect on the “why” and the “for whom” of our academic work, podcasting encourages us to translate those reflections into actions. Producing a podcast is unlike other forms of traditional academic publishing because the gatekeepers are fewer, making the idea-to-execution-to-publication timeline much shorter and, therefore, it creates a need for timely decisiveness. As a dialogical form, podcasting encourages discursive, in-progress thinking that, in many ways, opens the draftsmanship of scholarly pursuits to testimony and analysis. This is not to say that one cannot choose to carefully research and edit a series of episodes for years before finally releasing them; I am not suggesting that podcasting necessitates speedy and recklessly unfiltered content to qualify as recreational scholarship. Nor do I believe that academics should not be accountable for the work they put out into the world, regardless of the medium. However, the norms involved in the broader podcasting ecosystem—such as the expectation of seriality, a regular release schedule, and a parasocial relationship with listeners—encourage us to rethink whom we are accountable to as we are acting on it. While by no means eradicating it, podcasting closes the gap between author and listener in an embodied way through sound, thus creating opportunities for unusual sets of uncertainty in the tightly wound world of academia.
3.1. Meeting uncertainty with playfulness
I analyse the form of podcast using what Danielle Spencer calls the “three pillars of narrative medicine”: interdisciplinarity, narrative attentiveness, and the writerly text (Spencer Reference Spencer2021). Akin to the way narrative medicine strives to recontextualize clinical interactions to capture the holistic human experience of needing and seeking healthcare, I argue that podcasting can be a recreational scholarship praxis insofar as it challenges us to reframe the stories we tell about our work and with our work. Podcasting, because of its visceral call to “listen in” (Lacey Reference Lacey2011) and its dialogic negotiation of vulnerability, encourages us to reflect on our epistemic interventions and ask ourselves: What kind of space do I want to create to practice managing uncertainty? For there are many forms a podcast can take beyond the common factor of being an audio recording made available at will over the internet. The most common formats include solo podcasts, co-hosted podcasts, game show podcasts, reality show podcasts, long-form interview podcasts, and documentary-style podcasts where shorter clips are spliced together with a voice-over narration. All these formats can be used to produce fiction and non-fiction content alike. A solo podcast, for example, hosted by one person speaking directly to the audience, can be anything from a personal diary to critical cultural analysis. Each format provides a different configuration of constraints and opportunities through which we can devise storytelling rules and negotiate disclosure boundaries to manage uncertainty.
In Massively Disabled, I showcase my work as interdisciplinary work. This includes my use of sources from across the philosophical, historical, medical sociology spectrum as well as the range of my interviewees’ backgrounds and expertise. But I would like to take some time to reflect on how this project has allowed me to delve deeper into intradisciplinarity within philosophy. I was intentional in my embrace of the episodic—one could say Cartesianally meditative—format of the six-episode arc. I chose to foreground in-progress exploration without relinquishing my epistemic authority. Instead, I played with the veiling and unveiling involved in epistemic humility (Nyquist Potter Reference Nyquist Potter2022), both in the text by voicing my questions and frustrations, and in the editing, when I chose to leave in audio of my speech affected by pain and brain fog instead of rerecording a “better” take. Podcaster Kristen Meinzer says that you must choose what and when to reveal yourself to the listener (Meinzer Reference Meinzer2019) to make them feel invested. Cultivating a sense of intimacy, of parasociality, is an important aspect of consuming and engaging with podcasts. It is a form that encourages expressions that are deemed unseemly in other formats; we can hear guffaws and linguistic idiosyncrasies that are absent from academic essays, for example, but there is also an opportunity to showcase the performance of authenticity in a way that is different from an Instagram post or a tweet. Because you are in someone’s ear, because you can create a soundscape to people’s lives, to their commute, their chores, their waiting at the doctor’s office, you can play with that philosophical conversation and invite the listener to join conversational philosophy in the time and place of their choice. Captured intentional conversations between scholars are different from recorded lectures or ephemeral coffee chats because they offer up a glimpse into the drafting process of scholarship to a much larger audience. The audio medium captures the emotion and embodiment of scholarly pursuits in a way that is vulnerable yet likely less self-conscious than being filmed (Cook Reference Cook2023). In producing Massively Disabled I wanted to capture examples of the conversations disabled people have with each other every day, and I wanted to create opportunities for disabled scholars to talk to each other. Through my crip podcasting authorship I wanted to reflect both what is and make manifest what could be, that is, new cross-disciplinary and cross-community discussions. In this way, playful podcasting truly is insurgent because it both shares and creates the condition for intimate, vulnerable, and generous kinds of scholarship (Cook Reference Cook2023).
It can be challenging for people trained in academic philosophy to venture into this playful way of researching, especially in such a public way. I think of podcasting as a way to build intradisciplinary bridges between different philosophical cultures precisely because it takes us into unfamiliar territory where skills like robust argumentation and critical thinking have the potential to be reshaped and re-expressed anew. For example, my work is not the kind that is appropriate to publish in Mind or Nature, nor am I likely to get much out of simply attending the European Congress for Analytic Philosophy. However, I can encounter the same people who do publish in Mind and who present on logic in the semi-formal space of the podcast and engage with them meaningfully in the spirit of playfully exploring the process of knowledge creation (Cook Reference Cook2023; Declercq et al. Reference Declercq, Dikomitis, Meinen, Schoendube, Shaughnessy and Vanhoof2025). In this case, the continental/analytic divide and its accompanying methodological disputes loses power in the work of conversational engagement through intentional “loving perception.” As much as academia seems to value interdisciplinarity, rarely are protocols built in to facilitate the challenging work of bringing together disparate methods and scholarly cultures to pursue a common goal. Podcasting is a good way to test the waters and work toward more substantial (read: time-consuming and labor-intensive) collaborations by establishing a level of trust and mutual vulnerability.
Crafting a podcast also requires narrative attentiveness. Whether you are producing an anthology with different guests in each episode or are building a series, you are in charge of the aesthetic narrative of the project. This requires editorial decisions that are finely attuned not only to the narratives in the raw interviews, but also in the framing of these interventions. There is a certain accountability you have to your audience that reframes what we think of as a “literature review” in academic writing. When part of your “sources” are individuals whose voices will reach listeners doing their dishes or walking their dogs, questions of good faith and ethics arise and prompt you to rethink your methodology. In Phase 1 we broached some of the ethical themes around vulnerability and disclosure that arise when we let go of the strictures of performing academic competence. We apply the lens of narrative attentiveness to those themes when we choose to include a tangent or a moment of levity that would not have its place in a peer-reviewed article. Requiring more than an attention to the precision or even the context of an utterance, podcast narratives rely on tone and emotion, thus opening the playing field for arguments with built-in pauses or musical cliff-hangers, or even sound collages to express anxiety. When narrative attentiveness is paired with sound design and an ethic of accountability (toward your guests, your audience, and your overall storytelling aims), it encourages us to play with affective or emotional ways of philosophizing in public, even if just for the time of an episode.
Finally, podcasting can be a way to explore the writerly text. In Spencer’s sense of the writerly text, podcasting is an “in-between,” engaging the audience while not effacing the author, even when the latter is not explicitly centered. She cites Tod Chambers (Reference Chambers1999, 83, 88): “He [Chambers] invokes Barthes’s writerly text in describing the ethics case requirement that the reader ‘write the narrative in the act of reading. In order to have closure, ethics cases require that the reader take an active role and treat the narrative in a writerly manner.’” (Spencer Reference Spencer2021, 123, n. 22). In the ways in which podcasts demand engagement from the listener, with personable voices and sound design, they are an ideal medium for the writerly text as a feminist commitment to relationality. The podcaster is producing something meant to elicit an affective response, a narrative that invites the listener to reflect, react, or learn. On the other hand, the listener can feel less of a distance from the material, because of the tone and the informal experience. Podcasts, as a writerly text, are shaped by the way they are approached: in the car on the daily commute; in the doctor’s waiting room; before a scary test; while folding the laundry; during a pandemic-related lockdown.
The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages. (Barthes Reference Barthes and Howard1998, 5)
Because of this experiential open-endedness, podcasts lend themselves beautifully to crip time. Many disabled, mad, and chronically ill people describe having a syncopated and non-linear relationship to time and some express this experience through the concept of crip time (Samuels Reference Samuels2017). Living in crip time means having a high degree of tolerance for strangeness, accustomed to a bodymind that does not conform to conventional relationships to time, productivity, and life (Gauthier-Mamaril Reference Gauthier-Mamaril2024b). The disabled bodymind may be illegible to the logics of capitalism (Piepzna-Samarasinha Reference Piepzna-Samarasinha2022), yet disabled people still live in the world. Podcasts can become companions in crip time, when all others forsake us. They can be picked up and put down, binged, or selectively engaged as you move through your life in ways where written text cannot follow you. It is very difficult to read with your eyes while you are driving or when you are lying in total darkness to rest your aching body. But podcasts can be there for you. And, in turn, making a podcast is also different from writing other academic outputs because of its explicit call to relationality. Podcasting can be an example of disability as method insofar as we embrace the variety in form, in pace, and in transparency vis-à-vis the listener. For example, I have rarely seen academics write in pauses or interludes in their books or articles, let alone admitting to the temporality of writing on the page (a notable exception to this is “Black Disability Politics” by Schalk Reference Schalk2022). If we allow the form of podcasts to disrupt our pathways of theorizing and communicating, we can play with disclosing the space-time of authorship by addressing the listener directly.
I have argued that the three pillars of narrative medicine offer a generative framework to understand how we might go about meeting uncertainty in our scholarly discourse with playfulness. If we take seriously the cultural norms of podcasting, including its focus on storytelling, the genre reveals itself as a playground to practice inter/intradisciplinarity, narrative attentiveness, and producing writerly texts. These practices in turn prompt us to reflect and act on reshaped notions of knowledge co-creation, of the how and for whom of our scholarly methodologies. In fact, through the performative aspect of podcasting, it is also through action, through doing, that we reflect on these reconfigurations, including how we can and should use our relative power to distribute epistemic authority.
3.2. Distributed epistemic authority
The podcasting form can also be a site of distributed epistemic authority. Of course, this depends largely on the tone set by the host or the producer, but the conversational and semi-formal nature of the podcasting encounter should be used to trouble received notions about knowledge hierarchies. The importance the academy places on competence does not only harm the scholars within its towers; it actively upholds colonial, ableist, racist, and sexist classifications of knowledge (Hall and Tandon Reference Hall and Tandon2017; Purkayastha Reference Purkayastha, Ampofo and Beoku-Betts2021; Onyebuchi Eze Reference Onyebuchi Eze2024). Although we have arguably entered in an era that values co-production and that is concerned with epistemic justice, academic scholars still struggle to find non-academic discourse legible. This problem is particularly interesting to the philosophy of disability. For example, in Massively Disabled, I made a conscious decision to always include the voice of a disabled person (other than myself) in every episode. Of those disabled guests, some were currently employed in academia—in varying degrees of separation from the precariat—and some were not. Each one was invited because of their experience living with and/or studying long COVID. With this move, I intended to use the form as well as the content to invite my listeners to challenge the binary of lived experience/expert knowledge as well as their preconceptions about where they expect disabled people to be speaking from.
Another example of distributed epistemic authority is BEING Studio’s podcast, SPEAK (Gray and Ratcliffe Reference Gray and Ratcliffe2022). SPEAK explicitly centers artists with learning disabilities, which meant the producers based the project on the premise that artists are epistemic authorities on their practice and their views on art. Because of this starting point, the SPEAK production team (of which I was a part of for season 2) invested in a multi-pronged approach to facilitate the participation of each featured artist. This meant actively responding to various kinds of evolving access needs and collaborating closely with the artists’ support staff, carers, and family members in a way that always centered the guest, the artist, and not speaking for them. Positioning the artists as having an authorial practice further challenged mainstream ideas about the art world and artistic knowledge. Operating from the premise that the medium of the podcast will be cripped to meet the artists and not accepting that artists who do not fit the medium be excluded from the project, the SPEAK team set aside the time and the resources necessary to interview marginalized disabled people, including a non-speaking artist. Podcasting is an audio medium so this presented significant challenges. Five people on multiple Zoom meetings tried different tactics to find the way to make the artist feel most supported and, with the help of a blind voice actor, we produced that episode of SPEAK (Gray and Ratcliffe Reference Gray and Ratcliffe2022). This process was incredibly formative for the people involved in its production and sharing the finished episode further opens the possibility for unrelated listeners to rethink their relationships to podcasts, to art practice, and to storytelling. In this case, Mills and Sanchez’s “authorship phase” of production followed crip time understood as the durational aspect of epistemic contribution to artistic discourse. It was neither “efficient” nor impossible. It was what was necessary in order to include marginalized knowers in a public arena of knowledge production.
4. Phase 3: Process/practising agential fluidity
Often associated with the notion of “play” are the qualities of lightness, unseriousness, and changeability. And there is a sense in which the suggestions I’ve made about striving play fit with that notion. When we are involved in striving play, especially aesthetic striving play, we are learning to wear our agency lightly. We are learning not to be too stuck in a certain practical frame of mind, not too attached to certain clear goals. We [are] learning to dip in and out, to devote ourselves and then to pull back. We are learning to play around with our own practical attitudes. We are learning to be more lightfooted (sic) with our way of being in the practical world. (Nguyen Reference Nguyen and Thi Nguyen2020, 224)
So far, we have been exploring how the medium and form of podcasting can orient us to challenge the concepts of competence, uncertainty, and epistemic authority in our philosophical praxis. In Phase 3, we pivot to C. Thi Nguyen’s notion of “striving play” to discover how we may practice agential fluidity through the process of podcasting. In his book, Games: Agency as art, Nguyen suggests a distinction between striving and achievement play as two different ways of approaching gaming. Broadly, whereas achievement play prioritizes efficiency in reaching certain goals (e.g., winning the game, accumulating the most points, finishing the game faster), striving play uses goals as a way to orient the phenomenological experience of playing the game. In other words, in striving play, we devote ourselves to achieving certain goals because they allow us to create a framework of enjoyment. We understand that collecting all the green tokens means nothing in our non-gaming life, but we decide to turn ourselves into green token-hoarding dragons during gameplay because it is the temporary stakes that make the game worth playing. And while Nguyen’s attention to striving play is not directly analogous to Lugones’s critique of agonistic play, his focus on agency in play is an interesting way to develop that critique. Nguyen proposes games as a good way to practice agential fluidity with relatively lower stakes; I argue that scholars benefit from agential fluidity and that the space-time of podcasting can be a generative catalyst for a similar experimentation. In order to break free from the “ruly” world of academic productivity we must learn to “not be too stuck in a certain practical frame of mind” and to not be “too attached to certain clear goals” (Nguyen Reference Nguyen and Thi Nguyen2020). Through podcasting, we can allow ourselves to lean into different methods or to try out unconventional ways of working through concepts without committing to overhauling our entire scholarly practice. The role of recreational scholarship is to create pockets of space-time in which academics are encouraged to relate to their work creatively by placing it in unfamiliar settings with different stakes, audiences, and interlocutors, thereby providing a space where the labor of knowledge-generation can be playful and still be recognized as labor alongside—rather than in addition to—traditional outputs.
4.1. Striving play as agential play
Nguyen’s analysis focuses on games and specifically Suitsian games: “Suitsian games are structures of practical reasoning and practical action. Game designers aren’t just creating constraints; they are designing forms of action and agency.” (Nguyen Reference Nguyen and Thi Nguyen2020, 101). According to Nguyen’s reading of Suits, games are the opposite of “technical activities,” that is, activities we pursue because we value their end (Nguyen Reference Nguyen and Thi Nguyen2020, 5). Therefore, it might seem counterintuitive to apply this framework to podcasting since one arguably values the output, the podcast as a show, rather than the production process. Nevertheless, it is possible to adopt the posture of striving play in podcast production by being attentive to how we pick and choose which rules we want to use to shape the process. For example, in choosing who to invite as guests, what topics and tone should dominate, or how music and sound cues will underline or frame segments, the podcaster is setting up the arena for agential play.
For Nguyen, striving play is all about valuing the process of the game: for example, the way you feel challenged, the way you laugh with your playmates, or the feeling of escape and reprieve from reality you experience. For a striving player, it is more important to have an interesting game than to take the most efficient route to winning. On the other hand, an achievement player values the win above all else and is therefore not as concerned with the affective or intellectual payoff of taking more circuitous routes to victory. Nguyen is clear that we can all be achievement players and striving players at different moments in our lives and even in relation to the same game. But he considers, and I agree, that striving play is much more interesting to analyse because it provides the arena for agential fluidity. Therefore, to approach podcasting with an achievement play mindset would be to treat it as a technical activity like any other output in the neoliberal academe, which would not be very generative. Instead, the transformative capacity of podcasting is found when we think of it as striving play.
Promoting agential fluidity is a generative aspect of games for Nguyen. Whereas Lugones is critical of the agonistic practice of role-playing during gameplay because it represents the adoption of a “fixed identity,” Nguyen presents temporary agency as something positive for recreational and aesthetic reasons. As long as you are capable of leaving the role of the gameplayer behind once the game is over, it can be cathartic or instructive to immerse yourself in the logic of the game. To be absorbed in a game is to voluntarily take up arbitrary rules in a way that takes you out of real life. However, it matters how this temporary agency is approached. Lugones sees a problem with valuing fixed identities because that does not set us up for generous and curious “world”-traveling. Nguyen also cautions against the player who cannot let go of their role outside of the game and who, for example, starts applying game logic to their everyday life, demonstrating the inability to adjust to varying stakes. This is a case of the inner layer of agency, the one that exists during gameplay, not benefitting from interacting with a long-term outer layer of agency, that is, an agential practice that applies outside of the game. For the striving player, committing fully to temporary goals is shaped by their enduring priority of feeling challenged. In the realm of podcasting, it is possible to carve out this space publicly and relationally in a way that keeps us recreationally (rather than exploitatively) challenged. In turn, this agential play exists in the broader context of academic scholarship and a striving posture would encourage us to practice moving between our inner and outer layers of agency in a non-rigid, non-agonistic way that encourages us to reflect critically on our scholarly praxis.
The kind of fluid agency Nguyen is presenting has many echoes in Lugones’s idea of “world”-traveling. Where Nguyen speaks of holding multiple agential layers together simultaneously, Lugones refers to the double image outsiders in dominant worlds have of themselves (Lugones Reference Lugones1987: 14). I argue that Lugones develops this double self-image in later texts that engage with Gloria Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” (Lugones Reference Lugones1992, Reference Lugones1994), but that is beyond the scope of this article. I have explored the concept of mestizaje in relation to crip theory elsewhere (Gauthier-Mamaril Reference Gauthier-Mamaril and Tremain2024a). Both Lugones and Nguyen tie playfulness to a generative expression of multi-dimensionality. The major difference between the two accounts lies in Lugones’s political framing of “world”-traveling as a dance of power relations. Because his focus is games, Nguyen approaches the temporary nature of in-game agency as voluntary, while the marginalized individual for Lugones must world-travel out of necessity. Therefore, we can pull different commentaries on agency from both authors in a way that informs podcasting as recreational scholarship. Lugones teaches us to always keep in mind the power relations that shape scholarship and to choose an anti-imperialist approach to working within spaces that challenge our attachment to performative professional competence. Nguyen shows us how striving play can benefit our agential capacity by expanding it and diversifying it. Both urge us to honor the process over the output, which is very crip of them, I must say.
4.2. Working towards the in-process
An attention to messy becoming, to the never-ending process of existing as disabled in an ableist world, is a core tenant of cripistemology (Johnson and McRuer Reference Johnson and McRuer2014). By proposing podcasting as a form of recreational scholarship, I am arguing for public recognition of the value of research in-process. Because of its episodic nature, the finished podcast object can be intentionally left unfinished. This is not to say that it is not polished. On the contrary, a lot of thought goes into crafting a coherent and comprehensible narrative. And the demands of responsible scholarship means that I want to be able to justify everything I am putting out into the world, even if I eventually recant or evolve from a position I aired. But there is a certain refusal to take a hard-line “finished product” stance. Or, at least, I urge us to refuse this stance for liberatory purposes. Producing Massively Disabled gave me the chance to celebrate each aspect of my mulling over, of my simmering, of the slow, nuanced, and emotional labor that goes into my research. The doing of research takes so much out of me, but it is also where I find so much joy. I created my own set of constraints: to create six episodes roughly thirty to forty minutes long, to always include at least one clip from a disabled interviewee in each episode, and to commit to the apocalyptic framing narrative. Otherwise, I gave myself permission to cherish the process. I broke down my big goal into manageable chunks; then I polished up the chunks and showed them to the world. Bestowing worth on the partial, on the small bite, is an important part of resisting progress and cure narratives in crip theory (Clare Reference Clare2017). To step, roll, or crawl outside of biopolitical teleology of rehabilitation allows us to reclaim the health and wellbeing of our bodyminds as goals that inform our striving play. This kind of crip refusal requires practice, and that is what podcasting can give us the time, space, and culture to do. Scholarly podcasting is a way of embracing the truth universally acknowledged that research can go on forever; all outputs are partial. Cripistemology suggests that this is not a failing, that the partial deserves its due. Maybe, through practices like podcasting, a “third university” that harnesses the practices of the marginalized to subvert the system is possible (paperson Reference paperson2017).
5. Conclusion
I’m like, “I’m doing things on the periphery of my work that probably most people in my department don’t even notice”. And it kind of helps me. It’s kind of therapy for the work. (Samuel M. Clevenger, Somatic Podcast, in Cook Reference Cook2023, 29–30)
From Lugones, we have learned to not satisfy ourselves with being passively constructed by power relations and to, instead, choose playfulness to self-construct our shifting identities. In an ode to recreation, Lugones calls us to resist becoming exhausted by the construction the world makes of us by creating our worlds with intention (Lugones Reference Lugones1987, 17). She also insists that it is not a question of making an individual more at ease in a certain world or of increasing their fluency to make them more palatable. It is about the art of self-construction. Nguyen showed us how recreation can exist in dynamic relation with our non-game life and values in a way that encourages criticality and growth. I have argued that podcasting as recreational scholarship can create a pocket world where one could play with different relationships to our research methods and our scholarly practice while still remaining within the extended academic universe. By choosing a playful attitude to our public research, we can practice resisting exclusionary norms of professional scholarship to become more inclusive knowledge brokers. I do not think academia needs podcasting; rather, academics need something like podcasting to survive academia. The transformative power of recreational scholarship is first and foremost for the scholars who practice it, not the institution. Nevertheless, by honoring the tradition of crip refusal and practicing recreational scholarship, we can subvert the neoliberal norms surrounding competence and epistemic authority in ways that contribute to the reshaping of a more humane industry that is more inclusive of disabled scholars and of cripistemologies.
Cripistemologies are difficult to pin down, perhaps precisely because they resist the norms of neoliberal competence. Yet those of us who persist in between academic belonging and community grounding, those of us both/and-ing our survival still have meaningful roles to play as knowledge brokers. Podcasting is a crucible where we can try out those roles and stretch our agential muscles, brewing the kind of recreational striving that keeps us going another day.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the support of the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the University of Edinburgh, without which Massively Disabled would not have been produced. I also want to thank Morgan Kluck-Keil, who composed the original music and SFX for Massively Disabled. I am grateful for the community of scholarly podcasters and in particular Sadie Ryan, Eva Sprecher, Ian Sabroe, and Dieter Declercq for their mentorship and support. Finally, thank you to Rachel Gray and the staff and artists at BEING Studio for welcoming me into your practice of radical disability arts.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril is a disabled philosopher of disability. At the time of publication, she is a postdoctoral research associate on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture project at the University of Sheffield. Élaina’s work focuses on disability cultural knowledges of care and chronic illness, specifically long COVID. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Aberdeen.
