Phil & Matt start this episode by talking about their favorite writing implement: pens. Phil is reminded of the West Wing, again. While retelling the story of how we got our first unsolicited podcast advice, we had to do our first content edit after Phil told the listener to !@#$ off... Fortunately, the show moved on to things that actually matter.

Conferences & Making SSH Matter (16:10)

As academic conference season gets off to a start, Matt & Phil talk about how and why academics share their goods in public. If you’re looking for a large academic gathering of SSH like-minded folks, check out Congress 2017 organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Phil makes the claim that academics go to conferences to network, receive and and offer feedback on work, and contribute to publicizing SSH. Respect the time limit allotted, and practice before you present. It’ll make for better conferences all around. Conferences are also great places to network across disciplines.

Matt & Phil start to talk about relevance, and how SSH can be made to matter. Phil discusses Bent Flyvbjerg’s “Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again” (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Matt get’s going on the inability of fully understanding how biases impact our observations. Phil tries to tie Flyvbjerg’s approach back to conferences, arguing that speaking publicly about values, power relations and biases is important work. 

Recommendations (59:50)

• Matt recommends NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
• If you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, Phil recommends the podcast Sleep with Me.
• And, Matt & Phil both recommend to be nice to one another. 

Concluding thought: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” -Maya Angelou

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Follow Semi-Intellectual Musings on Twitter: @The_SIM_PodEmail Matt & Phil: [email protected]Subscribe to the podcast: https://thesim.podbean.com/feed/For full show notes: https://thesim.podbean.com/e/Conferences-Making-SSH-MatteriTunes: https://goo.gl/gkAb6VStitcher: https://goo.gl/PfiVWJGooglePlay: https://goo.gl/uFszFqPlease leave us a rating and a review, it really helps the show!Music: Song "Soul Challenger" appearing on "Cullahnary School" by CullahAvailable at: http://www.cullah.comUnder CC BY SA license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/