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Judith Burr applied creative methods to her interdisciplinary graduate degree

Master of Arts alumna used podcasting to create her thesis about living with fire

November 28, 2022

THE CREATIVE METHODS INSPIRED BY HER INTERDISCIPLINARY graduate program allowed master’s student Judith Burr to think beyond traditional written formats and instead create an academic podcast as her thesis project.

During her undergraduate degree at Stanford University in California, Burr  contributed to two podcasts—Philosophy Talk and Generation Anthropocene. After earning her undergraduate degrees and working as a freelance writer, Burr realized she wanted more structure and support so started looking for a master’s program.

“I was looking for a program that wasn’t in a major city that would let me do a digital audio thesis, and UBC Okanagan just kind of jumped out as a place I’d find support—it was an exciting opportunity.”

The audio podcast Burr created for her thesis was supported by her supervisors from day one. The podcast, called Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley, is centred on fourteen interviews discussing fire in the Okanagan Valley, and the history of living with fire in the region.

“Coming into a fire-prone landscape, I had some sense of what I wanted to figure out. I wanted to research and ask questions about what living with fire has been like here, historically and in the present-day.”

Burr adds that she already had some research experience related to fire. She learned about cultural burning—which is done by Indigenous communities using traditional Indigenous knowledge—while completing her honours thesis at Stanford University. Now in the Okanagan—and with so many questions about the reality of how we live with fire on a yearly basis—talking about these issues in the form of a podcast and having conversations with experts and people from the region allowed Burr to research fire history once again. It also begged contemporary questions about living with fire.

“I’m proud of the way I was able to develop something interdisciplinary in the digital and public humanities and use my thesis as a way to try and make a difference in the space of fire research.”

“I was looking for a program that wasn’t in a major city that would let me do a digital audio thesis, and UBC Okanagan just kind of jumped out as a place I’d find support—it was an exciting opportunity.”

As a student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program, under the supervision of Dr. Karis Shearer and Dr. Greg Garrard, Burr was excited about the possibilities of joining the Digital Arts & Humanities theme. She worked as a research assistant in the AMP Lab during her studies, with a focus on the SpokenWeb podcast. It was support from the AMP Lab community and the feedback she received from her supervisors that made finishing her podcast thesis possible. “I’m a big ideas person, and I needed something to help me reign it in,” she jokes.

Burr was also supported by the New Frontiers in Research Fund through UBC Okanagan’s Living with Wildfire project. The meetings and conversations she took part in through this interdisciplinary research community were an important part of her learning experience.

She says that Dr. Karis Shearer and Dr. Hannah McGregor, who supervised her work with the SpokenWeb Podcast, have worked to theorize what podcasting can be as an offering for academic research. “Podcasting is more than just sharing what we study; it actually can be a specific research process in and of itself.”

Through her thesis podcast, Burr wanted to share three key ideas: first, that fire has shaped life in the Okanagan Valley for millennia; second, the histories of wildfire, controlled burning and fire suppression are entangled with histories of Indigenous cultural oppression and illegalizing cultural burning practices; and finally, that podcasting can be an effective way to do academic research and share these complex stories. Burr also created her podcast to be accessible to people who are not fire researchers, and to contextualize it in terms of it being an academic project and thesis podcast.

“In doing feminist research, having queer and feminist faculty on staff has been a formative part of this program for me, as a queer person,” Burr says. “Within Dr. Shearer’s AMP Lab, we explicitly talked about and supported feminist digital humanities research, and that’s been really important to me as I worked to put my feminist values into practice in my thesis podcast work.”

Burr has now started her doctoral studies in geography at UBC Vancouver. “I’m excited to continue researching these interdisciplinary threads in the context of geography. There are communities of digital geographers, feminist geographers and historical geographers in the department, and all of these play to my interest in fire history and the way I do research.”

Burr says she plans to continue studying fire and environmental history and thinking about public humanities work in a way that is connected to public conversations, needs and knowledge.