About Us

What is 3620?

3620 is a podcast of and about communication scholarship.

We have a couple ideas in mind when we talk about this podcast.

1) It should remind us of why we do what we do. That is, it should excite us about our own research. This means we have to do some translation. If a journal article requires that we use and modify some hefty concepts and words, then the podcast requires we distill them down. This means we can take journal articles, books, interviews, etc and poke them for their stakes. Why do we study this stuff? Why is it important? Along the way, we’ll find that we might make some good stories and discover some interesting stuff.

2) It is not ancillary to our research. It is constitutive and generative of it. Sometimes the best ideas come to you not while you’re deep in writing a paper, but once you’ve looked away from it for a second. In producing content for a podcast that is not in a traditional academic form, we will generate ideas and tease out the subtleties of ones we already have. Too infrequently do we get to talk to each other about what it’s like to actually do research; how it works, what the problems are, how to make it better all the time. Opening up this black box might very well make us better researchers!

3) It’s about capitalizing on the interesting things that happen around us all the time. Funny stories, surprising facts, and fascinating ideas riddle our daily lives. But you can only start to make them meaningful when you activate the feelers that can help you keep track of them. So we’re activating those feelers! We’re pulling all those loose threads that pop up from day to day and unravel them into complex, fun content.

4) It’s a form of digital scholarship. It’s good for our brains to focus on producing something that will never go under peer-review. And not just some product, but a really smart, intriguing product. This is certainly a form of digital scholarship and we’ll explore how.