Academic life, argued at speed.
Tara Brabazon podcast treats university life as both an intellectual project and a workplace under pressure. Conversations move quickly from research impact, teaching, and PhD examination into power, care, boundaries, community links, and the daily habits that keep scholarship alive.
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Tara Brabazon podcast is an energetic higher-education series about the work, politics, language, and emotional load of academic life. It speaks from inside the university rather than from a management brochure. The show is fast. It asks why familiar terms such as impact, engagement, stakeholders, partnerships, fit, public good, teaching, research, and service matter, and what happens when those terms become hollow or punitive. Recent episodes often centre on conversations with Professor Priscilla Dunk-West. Together, the discussions turn institutional abstractions into practical problems: how to build a positive academic culture, how to manage boundaries in a porous social media age, how to create a research trajectory after the PhD, and how community relationships can be built without reducing communities to funding opportunities. The tone is conversational but rarely casual in its stakes. A passing joke about visibility becomes a way to explain research culture. A complaint about fragmented academic roles becomes a deeper concern about separating teaching from research. The show also has a strong mentoring current. It encourages writing in small daily acts, collaboration with colleagues, careful service on boards and reference groups, and a more active understanding of political and professional change. It is not neutral about damaged workplaces. Bullying, toxic cultures, precarity, social media harm, and institutional neglect are treated as real conditions that shape scholarship. At the same time, the series keeps looking for workable habits and humane structures. It suits academics who want critique with use, and PhD students who need someone to name the pressures without making the doctorate sound smaller than it is. It can be intense. It is also unusually companionable.
Made for: Best for PhD students, supervisors, lecturers, researchers, and university leaders who want practical thinking about academic work. It also suits listeners interested in the politics of teaching, research, service, and community engagement.
What sets it apart: The show turns higher-education vocabulary into live professional judgment. It combines workplace candor, scholarly critique, and concrete academic habits without smoothing away the frustration behind them.
Tara Brabazon explores popular culture and education, and the relationship between them.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Tara Brabazon turns academic work into practical questions about writing, careers, institutional power and responsibility beyond the university.
Tara Brabazon approaches academic life as a set of practices that can be examined, challenged and improved. Her conversations move between doctoral writing, research careers, community relationships and workplace boundaries, with questions that keep institutional language tied…
A paragraph a day sounds modest until Tara Brabazon makes it your research trajectory.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A humane, brisk case for academic workplaces built through fun, translation, care, and deliberate connection.
Academic culture is treated here as everyday work: the meetings, habits, jokes, trust, and shared purpose that let academic life feel worth returning to.
A grounded conversation about rebuilding research momentum after the PhD when support is thin.
Research careers rarely move in a straight line, and this episode understands the drag as well as the drive. Tara Brabazon and Professor Priscilla Dunk-West trace the period after the PhD, when fatigue, the second-book question, and thin institutional support can make research…
Boundary management, workplace fit, and the gap between speaking out and changing things.
The discussion treats boundary management as a practical problem, moving beyond the old cliche about moving to Utah for space and toward the harder question of how a private life holds up in a social media age.
A careful look at community ties that puts public good ahead of extraction.
Community connections are treated as a public good rather than a branding exercise. The host and Professor Priscilla Dunk-West move past familiar talk of impact, engagement, partnerships and stakeholders to ask what authentic relationships with communities look like when…
A close look at drafting, editing, and the learning embedded in doing the work.
Episode nine turns to writing and drafting, using Tara Brabazon and Jamie Quinton revisiting the period when they were courting and he shared his PhD with her as a useful frame.
A clear look at how impact and engagement are evidenced beyond citations.
Tara Brabazon and Professor Priscilla Dunk-West take on two terms that are often treated as obvious: impact and engagement. Rather than letting them blur together, they separate them carefully and keep the discussion anchored in practical evidence, from policy and procedure…
A practical guide to working with Elders that treats small textual choices as serious research ethics.
The Flinders University STEP session frames work with Elders as a matter of research sovereignty, and it gives that idea weight through small but meaningful choices.
Campus radio from the wrong side of reality.
Campus decisions, Northeast news, and Northeast priorities.
How research culture changes in practice.
Conversations from inside the IT channel.
Tara Brabazon interviews Dr.
Tara Brabazon hosts Professor Priscilla Dunk-West to dissect the often conflated concepts of impact and engagement in academic research.
This episode explores how academics can develop a sustainable research trajectory after completing their PhD, addressing challenges in higher education and offering strategies for building long-term research careers.
This episode features a conversation with Professor Priscilla Dunk-West exploring the concepts of impact and engagement in contemporary research culture, their differences, and challenges in verification.
Community connections are the subject, and the conversation starts by pushing back on university habits that turn them into funding language.
This episode explores how to build a positive and compassionate academic culture in universities, focusing on joy, fun, and playfulness as key ingredients.
Tara Brabazon opens a conversation with Professor Priscilla Dunkwest about boundaries and boundary management.
This episode discusses the challenges in aligning teaching and research in academia, using a zombie apocalypse metaphor to critique current educational metrics and advocate for rebuilding productive connections.
This episode explores the fragmentation of teaching and research in modern academia and discusses the importance of balancing these roles with Professor Priscilla Dunk-West.
Tara Brabazon says Nobel Prize winners called journal tiering rubbish, and calls academic publishing "a Ponzi scheme."
This episode discusses the importance of understanding the examination process from the start of a doctoral candidature, focusing on submission and examination in academia.
This episode explores the value of failure in academic research, contrasting it with the celebratory success narratives often seen on social media.
Episode nine turns to writing and drafting.
This episode features an interview with Megan Bayliss, a PhD student at Charles Darwin University, discussing her journey as a mature-age student pursuing doctoral studies from Norfolk Island.