Homework: Interesting interviews to analyze in terms of questioning techniques

• This week (Feb. 13-20), please listen to your interview twice, to get familiar with it. You are not expected to do any blogging about it this week as you will be busy finishing your midway paper.
• Next week (Feb. 20-27), please complete this homework assignment by transcribing the interviewer's questions and commenting on your blog as directed below!

1) Interview with Wade Davis and Peter Gzowski (18:00) 

Do zombies exist? If so, how can they be explained scientifically? Those are some questions UBC ethnobotanist Wade Davis set out to answer when he began his field work in Haiti in the early 1980s. This research led to his fascinating 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. In this 1986 interview with CBC's Peter Gzowski, Davis explains how certain drugs, combined with Haiti's cultural beliefs, can create what appears to be a zombie -- someone who rises from the dead and walks around in a trance-like state.

2)  Fighting hate with friendship: One Exalted Cyclops at a time (14:20)
CBC Radio's Piya Chattopadhyay's 2018 interview with Afro American musician Daryl Davis and ex-KKK member Scott Shepherd -- about Davis' work in bringing hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members around to leaving the racist organization.

3) Richard Fidler's Australian Broadcasting Company interview with Ira Glass from PBS This American Life -- on his secrets behind doing great radio interviews in the style of his show. (Listen from 4:12 - 21:12)


Have each member of your Reading Circle choose a different one of these interviews to listen to. As you listen, transcribe all the interviewer's questions and comments ONLY (not the interviewee's answers).

Then write a blog entry that considers the nature of these questions. How could you categorize them? Which questions were pre-planned? Which ones flowed from the interviewer's listening and interacting with the interviewee? Which were not even questions at all? What position or stance did the interviewer take at various points in the interview? What were the interviewer's aims at various points? Try re-listening to see if you can make sense of the development of the interview and changes in its 'flow'.

In this assignment, you may want to take some of these ideas into account:

• The researcher's views of the nature of their research (technical, controversial, action-oriented, practice-oriented, critical/emancipatory ….)
• The researcher's position relative to participants (distant and removed, or close and connected to participant's lives)
• The researcher's direction of gaze (inward to self, or outward to others)
• Purpose (professional, personal or useful to participants/community)
• Intended audience 
• Agency (passive or engaged in making change, etc.)
• What is the flow of the interview? How does the interviewer follow up on ideas, fold back to earlier topics, etc.?