You are in the Credits maze.

The Labyrinth-LENS podcast series was built out of interview materials collected as part of our research project. As anthropologists and scientists, part of our work involves talking with people about the topics we study, and often we record these conversations, with the consent of the people we talk with. Current practices (governed by Institutional Review Boards at all universities) generally require that such conversations be anonymous and confidential. When we publish any such material, therefore we try to remove any identifying information and use pseudonyms where possible. In audio material we do the same. Any questions about the use of this material can be directed to the UCLA IRB (see the methods section for more detail).

Spencer Robins podcast builds on our extensive collection of conversations from Nextdoor, which we analyze in a couple of different papers (here and here), and which despite our initial skepticism, have turned out to yield more and more than we ever expected. It was a short step from analyzing them to creating Nextdoor theatre when we asked ourselves how to translate these conversations into audio. Spencer went above and beyond finding audio sources and writing an extraordinary narrative—so much so that it is an example of the podcast driving our ideas about how to write about this topic, and not a podcast ‘about’ our research.

Spencer’s podcast has an alternative ending. We debated long and hard whether to use “Brilliant Disguise” by Bruce Springsteen, who is arguably the consummate American songwriter of late modern decline, and whose song just seemed to work so well. But there is another consummate American songwriter whose work also, in a maybe more lighthearted way, seemed to work. If you prefer Dolly, she graces the ending of this one, from about 33:00 onwards.