Blog 2 - Squadcast

Sweta and I have been hard at work researching our topic and progressing in the creation of our podcast. We have started to reach out to different people and have already had a few conversations about our topic with various people over Zoom and email. Through new and old, connections, we have been able to schedule 3 interviews so far. Our first will be an interview with Waverly Willis, who owns a hair salon where he also has held vaccine clinics for community members. I think he is a perfect subject for this podcast because I believe that he can speak for both the inequities that have presented themselves in respect to access to the COVID-19 vaccine as well the initiatives made to combat and alleviate these inequities. 

Evergreen Podcasts has graciously allowed us to use an outside recording software called "Squadcast" (a platform similar to zoom) to record our interview bookings. This platform is similar to Zoom but is different because each speaker's voice is recorded into a different audio file. This is useful for podcasting because it makes the process of editing much easier. For example, if two people interrupt each other or a host accidentally cuts a guest off or vice versa, the separate audio files allow the two voices to actually be separated in the editing process. However, Sweta and I have run into some obstacles with this platform. In our first attempt to join the platform, we troubleshoot for an hour and a half at Hawken before getting some tips from a Hawken faculty member who has used the platform before and trying to join from home the next day. (which worked! by the way.) Now we just have to try and get it to work while we are at Hawken so we can have a workday together while being able to record interviews.

As I complete this project, I really want to remember the concept of how disparities stem from many different roots of systemic inequities built into the systems that we live in today. While it is actually harder to make change within a broken system rather than dismantle it entirely, I think that it'll be worth stressing the concept of being able to make change without having the ability to dismantle a system in the podcast.

-Wilson Ha

Comments

  1. Dr. PJune 2, 2021 at 6:47 AM

    "being able to make change without having the ability to dismantle a system"--love this! Miniscule changes add up to cause a true dismantling.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog 8: Final Reflection

 What inspired me to create this project was wanting to learn more about the world around me and share the information I’ve learned with others. Especially in a setting like Hawken, we are too often caught in our own private school bubble, when the real world is nothing of the sort. It’s not particularly anyone’s fault. However, I think it is important to understand the flawed systems that we live in, and part of that learning is being exposed to the issues around us. I definitely was not thinking about these important inequities until COVID-19 and The Black Lives Matter movement really exacerbated issues of inequity in the health system in 2020. I think that especially with the COVID-19 vaccine, we can see how disparities in who is getting the vaccine based on race and socioeconomic status mirror inequities that have been present for many years. Initially, we had planned on producing just one episode, and I’m glad we made that decision because we just were able to finish with th...
Read more

Blog 4 - Interviews Galore

Image
 We have had many interviews in the past few days.  We interviewed Taneisha Fair, who works at Cleveland Comunity Center. She helped write an article on the Center for Community Solutions Blog titled “Inability to miss work contributed to vaccine hesitancy and likely, lower vaccination rates”. This post showed how the same areas of the county that have both lower vaccination rates and more low-wage workers are also the communities that have more people of color than the affluent communities with higher vaccination rates. These communities are more on the east side of Cuyahoga county, zip codes like 44103, 44104, 44106, 44108, and many others. Refer to my last post for more details about the article. She talked to us about an issue that has come from discussions around Black people and the vaccine that I hadn't talked about before. She talked about how she has heard a lot of people attribute that because of the Tuskegee syphilis trials, Black people don't want to get the vacci...
Read more

Blog 6: Narration

Image
 Today, we met up with producer Hannah to record our narration. We have spent a lot of time on our script, and we had scripted lines as welll as general points that we wanted to talk about in the narration. The way that we wanted to structure the podcast was through the a conversation between Sweta and I that introduces quotes from our interviews at the appropriate times. A good chunk of the podcast would be Sweta and I talking however. Recording ourselves was really cool because up until now, we have only been using Squadcast to record our interviews. We set up into two different rooms that were adjacent to each other, with me in one and Sweta in the other. There was a mic, headphones, and stand in each room, as well as a big window where we could see each other. This way, we could record ourselves on two different audio channels while being able to see and hear each other. We also had producer Hannah in another room who set up the levels and recorded us. The narration we fi...
Read more