The Society Pages is a public sociology platform hosted by the University of Minnesota, designed to make social science research accessible to non-academic audiences. As Senior Content Producer, I managed the full production pipeline for the site's flagship podcast series and led editorial strategy for the Culture section. The core challenge was consistent across every episode: take a scholar's research — often developed over years, written for specialist audiences, and embedded in disciplinary debates a general listener has never encountered — and produce a twenty-to-thirty-minute audio piece that makes the work intelligible, compelling, and worth a listener's time. That translation process is instructional design. The medium is different, but the underlying work — identifying the core ideas, sequencing them for a specific audience, and making design decisions about pacing, structure, and emphasis — is the same.
Each episode moved through a structured pipeline. The process began in weekly editorial meetings, where the team identified recently published books, articles, or research projects that warranted coverage. Once a pool of potential subjects was established, I assigned pieces to producers based on interest and fit, and took on the episodes I was best positioned to handle — usually work that intersected with my own research areas or required more experienced editorial judgment.
For episodes I produced, the first substantive step was obtaining and reading the work in question. Reading the full text — not a summary, not the introduction — was non-negotiable. You cannot design a conversation that scaffolds understanding of a book's argument if you haven't engaged with the argument yourself. This mirrors a principle from instructional design more broadly: you have to understand the subject matter deeply enough to make decisions about what to foreground, what to simplify, and what to leave out.
From the reading, I developed a question framework tailored to each guest. While the specific questions varied, the structural logic was consistent: open by grounding the listener in the author's motivation and relationship to the project, then move into the substance of the argument, and close with implications or connections the listener could carry forward. The goal was to build understanding incrementally — the same scaffolding logic that structures a well-designed lecture — rather than dropping a listener into the middle of an academic debate without context.
The episode that best illustrates this design process — and the one that won Best Podcast of the Year from The Society Pages — was my interview with sociologist Jooyoung Lee about his ethnographic study of aspiring rappers in South Central Los Angeles. Lee's book is a careful, empathetic piece of urban ethnography, but it sits at the intersection of several topics (race, poverty, artistic labor, violence, masculinity) that could easily overwhelm a twenty-minute conversation if not carefully sequenced.
The interview was designed to open with Lee's own entry into the field — why he chose to embed himself in this particular community, what drew him to the project — before moving into the ethnographic findings. This wasn't small talk; it was a deliberate scaffolding decision. A listener who understands the researcher's motivations and positionality is better prepared to engage with what that researcher found, because they have a frame for interpreting the material. The result was an episode that communicated the substance of a complex ethnographic monograph to an audience with no prior exposure to the work or the field.
Production consistency across multiple producers required shared infrastructure. I established a collaborative asset library in Google Drive containing standardized templates: intro and outro scripts, theme music files, and formatting guidelines. This ensured that episodes maintained a consistent identity regardless of which producer handled the editing, and it reduced onboarding time for new contributors. Recordings were captured via remote call and edited in Audacity, where I handled cuts for pacing, clarity, and coherence.
A centralized Google Drive containing theme music, intro/outro script templates, and production guidelines. This standardized output across multiple producers and reduced the ramp-up time for new team members — the same logic behind maintaining shared course templates in an instructional design team.
Each interview was designed with a deliberate arc: context and motivation first, core argument second, broader implications last. This mirrors backward design — starting from what the listener should understand by the end and structuring the conversation to build toward it.
Editing decisions — what to cut, where to tighten, when a tangent serves the episode and when it doesn't — are content design decisions. They require the same judgment as deciding what to include in a lecture module: what advances the learner's understanding, and what's noise.
As Senior Content Producer, I assigned episodes to other graduate student producers, provided editorial guidance on interview preparation and question design, and reviewed edited episodes before publication. This supervisory role parallels the collaborative dimension of instructional design work.
Not every episode went according to plan. During one in-person recording session, an equipment malfunction cut the usable interview audio from approximately thirty minutes to seventeen — less than half of the material I had planned the episode around. Rather than scrap the episode or attempt to re-record the full interview, I assessed what was salvageable and redesigned the episode structure on the fly. To compensate for the lost material, I worked with the graduate student producer to develop an extended analytical outro — a produced segment where the producer discussed the book's key ideas in their own voice, contextualizing the interview excerpts and drawing out the themes that the truncated conversation couldn't fully develop.
The experience reinforced something that applies equally to instructional design: production rarely goes exactly as planned, and the ability to redesign a deliverable under real constraints — time, material, team capacity — is as important as the ability to design it well in the first place.
The pieces below represent different aspects of the production process: long-form research interviews, topical editorial writing, and work that connects directly to my own research on diversity and race.
Conversation with sociologist Jooyoung Lee about aspiring rappers in South Central Los Angeles. Winner of Best Podcast of the Year from The Society Pages.
Interview with Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol on conservative political infrastructure. Designed to make organizational sociology accessible to a general audience.
Interview on how elite university students understand race and meritocracy. Connects directly to my research on diversity discourse.
Discussion of race, sport, and social policy with sociologist Douglas Hartmann. Illustrates how to make policy research engaging by anchoring it in a specific, vivid case study.
The work on this page is fundamentally about one thing: translating expert knowledge into content designed for a specific audience that doesn't share the expert's background. That's the core of what instructional designers do when they work with faculty to develop course materials, learning objects, or multimedia content. The medium here was audio; the design logic — audience analysis, content sequencing, scaffolded complexity, iterative production — is the same regardless of format.