104. LIVE! from The Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference w/ The Long Take Review Podcast

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Dan recorded LIVE from the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, NM w/ USC colleagues Jen Sopchockchai Bankard & P.T. McNiff of the Long Take Review podcast. Shoutout to SWPACA, the tech guy who helped make this happen, and everyone that came out to support!

Their presentation, “Between Two Scholastic Worlds: Teaching, Blogging, and Podcasting,” examined the negotiation between the pop-culture world and the academic lives, how podcasting and pop-culture curiosity is used in the classroom, the pressures of being an independent podcaster, and they answered some amazing questions from the audience. There’s so much more, so get ready to take notes, because class is in session!

Jen Sopchockchai Bankard is an Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California and has been a pop culture nerd ever since wearing out VHS tapes of the original Star Wars trilogy as a kid. In addition to The Nostalgia Test, she has been a guest on The Rebel Base Card Podcast, The ColbyCast, The Wampa’s Lair Podcast, and Coffee With Kenobi.

For in-depth reviews of all new Star Wars and Marvel releases and anything else that fits in the nerd content bucket, visit and subscribe (for free!) to The Long Take Review . You can also find her writing about Star Wars on Fantha Tracks.

Follow Jen: Instagram & X
Hive Social & Letterboxd:
@QuiGonJen
Follow The Long Take: Instagram & Substack

P.T. McNiff is an Associate Professor in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He received a masters in fiction writing from USC and a bachelors in English & Communication from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been teaching both first-year and advanced writing for over a decade; for the last five years, he has also co-taught a summer workshop in creative writing for high school students. In addition, he has served on numerous faculty governance committees at the program, college, and university levels. He writes fiction, non-fiction, and overly long text messages.

Follow P.T: Instagram

Daniel Dissinger is an Associate Professor in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California, host of the award-winning podcast Writing Remix, host of the comedy pop-culture podcast The Nostalgia Test Podcast, a poet, Kerouac scholar, and writing coach. Dan earned his PhD and MA from Saint John’s University as well as an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Dan’s poetry has been published in a variety of journals, and Shadow Mountain Press published his first chapbook, tracing the shape. In 2021, he co-created an international network of academic podcasters called The Humanities Podcast Network.

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People and Texts Mentioned in the Episode

“The part of the name, The Long Take, came from a desire to sort of infuse more scholarly discourse and sort of embrace the idea that we are long winded academics who like to talk about things in depth and for a long time […] while maintaining a sort of popular audience appeal for a show, we do have ways that we are trying to kind of sneak in […] things that we talk about in our teaching lives, in our scholarly lives, primarily from the field of rhetoric and composition.”
-Jen Sopchockchai Bankard

“When you’re thinking about this whole other audience of people listening at home, I have to then have this other brain going in the background being like, wait, are people gonna know what that is? Do I have to stop and explain that?”
-Jen Sopchockchai Bankard

“One thing I’m finding is that maybe it’s the term ‘academic’ that gets in the way of this idea, of this cipher of intellectual discourse that we’re having, right? Because, well, that’s what we’re doing.”
-Dan Dissinger

“I feel like we have to be aware of our audience. But at the same time, like for The Nostalgia Test […] I want to bring this other part [the academic part] of my world to them.”
-Dan Dissinger

“I think that the crossover isn’t just in that direction of sort of, ‘Oh, I get to show the personal,’ but I think there’s […] a hunger for some of these insights and some of the perspectives.”
-P.T. McNiff

“In terms of the process versus products dynamic I have only really used [podcasting] as a process example of here’s how we approach things […] like a problem that I face that may be similar to something that the students are doing, audience recognition, figuring out how to best explain something not overriding or over talking which is something that can happen.”
-P.T. McNiff

“A lot of the courses that we teach are very process focused, teaching students, especially our first year composition class, mainly […] you did okay if you managed to teach them to have a writing process that they reflect on […] I think for me, oftentimes, I am framing [podcasting and pop-culture work] as I am an active practitioner of the thing I’m teaching.”
-Jen Sopchockchai Bankard

“I’m not just creating [scholastic] work. I’m also building community. And at the same time, this work is archival and everyone has access to it. So I try to push this idea [that] I’m doing all these things in this pedagogical way and I frame it as pedagogy as much as I possibly can”
-Dan Dissinger

Episode 104 Transcript

The transcript for this episode is not corrected

Ep.104 TranscriptDownload

This episode was recorded live on February, 2024 from the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference. The theme song is “4 am” by Makaih Beats. You can follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher, join the newsletter for a bunch of extras (a Note From Dan, episode-specific writing prompts, and book recommendations, & follow us on Twitter @WritingRemixPod & Instagram @WritingRemixPod.

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