Crowdfunding launch supports Ways of Knowing podcast at Cornell

Cornell will be the setting for an upcoming season of “Ways of Knowing,” a new podcast created by Chris Hoff ’02 and Sam Harnett, co-creators of the NPR radio show The World According to Sound. The podcast is produced in partnership with leading universities to explore facets of the humanities through sound. Hoff and Harnett spent a semester-long residency at Cornell in Fall 2019, supported by Cornell's Media Studies Program.

A crowdfunding campaign launched Nov. 1 to support the Cornell-based season, a collaboration with media studies scholars in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). Open through Dec. 5, the campaign’s initial goal is $5,000.

The Ways of Knowing season, titled “Media Objects,” amplifies Cornell research in a wide variety of disciplines, including music, information science, sociology, classics, communication and performing and media arts, as well as highlighting Cornell’s leadership in the field of media studies. A trailer and two pilot episodes – “Containers” and “Typewriters” – are complete. Future episodes will focus on topics such as buttons, mixtapes, artificial intelligence, office plants and the book.  

“It’s asking listeners to consider that what we typically mean by the concept of media – newspapers, radio, TV, film – is much smaller than what media and mediation actually do in our world,” said Jeremy Braddock, associate professor of literatures in English (A&S) and chair of the CIVIC Media Studies Initiative. “That has been one of the foundational ideas that’s driven media studies at Cornell.”

Cornell media studies scholars, including Erik Born, assistant professor of German studies (A&S), Paul Fleming, the L. Sanford and Jo Mills Reis Professor of Humanities (A&S), and Braddock, are advising the episodes.

“They’re sonic essays,” Harnett said. “Instead of an academic paper or a news piece or a podcast, you’re listening to a sonic representation of an idea. It’s kind of a translation. We take the ideas and thoughts in the academic work, and we find the ways in sound to represent them.”

Harnett and Hoff make sound works that are unique – not your typical interview podcast or narrative radio show. For example, an episode about “Containers,” inspired by an essay by Cornell communications scholar Brooke Erin Duffy and University of Toronto scholar Jeremy Packer, is an audio collage featuring music and archival audio from 1980s Tupperware parties. It also includes an interview with Duffy, associate professor in the Department of Communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and member of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty (A&S).

The episodes aim to evoke rather than explain, Hoff said.

“We might tell you a big idea, but we’re going to come at that idea five different ways sonically that make you think. It allows you to think about, say, containment in a way that an academic paper just can’t. Audio can do things writing can’t. We’re trying to tap into that.”

During their 2019 residency at Cornell, Braddock introduced the duo to a BBC television program from the 1970s, “Ways of Seeing.” They said that this experience, combined with their semester of engagement with Cornell scholars from many disciplines, planted the seeds of Ways of Knowing in their minds.

The first Ways of Knowing season, done in partnership with the University of Washington,  introduces different analytical methods and disciplines in the humanities. Further seasons focus on other universities, including a look at science and metaphor at the University of Chicago and a humanistic history of astronomy with Johns Hopkins University.

But returning to Cornell is like coming back home for Hoff and Harnett, they said. The Cornell season circles back to the place that inspired the series in the first place.

“There are moments when these podcasts are quite impressionistic, as if to say, let’s listen to what Tupperware containers sound like or what would it mean for a typewriter to be a musical instrument,” said Braddock. “But the pieces also have real arguments that are grounded in the kinds of research we do at Cornell, and we think that listening to them will make you want to explore further.”

The creators aspire to produce three or even more seasons at Cornell; they said that they think Ways of Knowing could hit it big, reaching national syndication.