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Bridging Divides With Stories, with Elizabeth Keating
Dr. Elizabeth Keating is a linguistic anthropologist who explores language -- and more recently, narrative -- to understand people's daily experiences. In her new book, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations, she explores the power of asking open-ended questions that create connections by revealing the particularities of people's lives.
As much as I find this topic compelling in my personal life, I am intrigued by how leaders can use this approach to learn more about their campuses. This approach seems particularly useful when folks are new to a campus or a role, and seek to understand what is unique about their new community.
In particular, we discuss how specific questions that seem concrete open the door to meaningful memories, and the magic of asking people how they spend their time.
Let's connect! Come find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.
I also coach women leaders (individually and in groups) and facilitate campus workshops. Learn more at the website.
Have a question about whether I can help you? Just ask! I actually love getting emails from listeners. 🧡
Some of you have heard me say this before, but this year I have learned so much about marketing, much to my surprise. I freaking love marketing, but of course I do. It's storytelling, and now that I spend more of my time thinking in stories, I'm having that experience where the thing you think about you suddenly see everywhere. Stories and storytelling are appearing everywhere in my world. I've even been invited to keynote a conference next spring specifically to talk about storytelling in higher ed. So naturally I was drawn to the work of Elizabeth Keating and her new book, which is called the Essential Questions interview your family to uncover stories and bridge generations. So I'm drawn to this, in part because of my personal history. As a kid I was partially raised by my grandparents and I felt like I knew them pretty well. But when my grandmother died a few years ago and my cousins were recalling their memories, I felt like we had all experienced a different woman. It made me realize how few stories my extended family really shares. And then, as I started to explore Elizabeth's work, I got really curious about how what she learned about storytelling might help leaders on college campuses. On campuses we spend so much of our time telling stories about ourselves, who we are as a community, why you should join us, what we believe in, what we stand for, what we care about, and I began to wonder could asking better questions to bridge divides actually be a useful strategy for leaders? You are going to have to listen to the episode to find out. Although, spoiler alert, the answer is yes. Today, I'm welcoming Dr Elizabeth Keating to the show.
Carole Chabries:Elizabeth is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in culture and communication. Her newest book, which is her third, reached number one on Amazon's Movers and Shakers in Books during its first week of publication and the next week it was number one in cultural anthropology. Her book, which is called the Essential Questions interview your family to uncover stories in bridge generations takes an anthropological approach to finding out about your own family history, and the Essential Questions help you uncover new sides of family members you've known all your life. Elizabeth's academic research and writing focuses on narrative and knowledge transfer in families, as well as the impacts of technology on society, visual communication, cross-cultural communication and language and hierarchy. She has conducted fieldwork in Micronesia, in the deaf community, in Romania, india, brazil, ireland, the Isle of man, germany and the US. She has presented talks and papers in 15 countries on a variety of topics in language and culture, and she's authored or co-authored over 50 academic articles. She's given talks about her research on communication in global teams at Google and in other business settings.
Carole Chabries:She's a past editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and a past director of the Science, technology and Society program at UT Austin. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley and a PhD in anthropology from UCLA, and she's been a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UT Austin for over 25 years. All that and she made me wish I were an anthropologist. Elizabeth, welcome to the show. I'm so glad to have you here today. I'm so happy to be here. I don't even remember how I came across your research, but I read a little bit about your book, the Essential Questions, and it prompted me to learn a little bit more about who you are, what you do and how you do it. So can you start by telling us anything about yourself that's not part of your standard bio that you think would help us to know?
Elizabeth Keating:I'm a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas. That's something that is known about my bio. Possibly what isn't known about my bio is that I have had a couple of leadership positions in the university. The principal one was the director of science, technology and society for liberal arts for four years, and I must say that I wish I had had your insights, listening to your podcasts. That I really needed then, because I did think that I was all enthusiasm and hard work and not enough thoughtfulness about how slowly the university might want to take itself. I learned a lot, but I think it could have certainly could have been a lot smoother, but I have done that. I love running and I love bicycle riding and hiking of all kinds. I love the outdoors. One of the things about this university job is it's pretty much an indoor job.
Carole Chabries:Your field sites are not necessarily in the great outdoors either.
Elizabeth Keating:That's right, they can be. The first field work I did was on a very small island in the Pacific north of New Guinea and east of the Philippines, although it's on the equator very nearby and so it's very heavily forested jungle and it seems a lot bigger. But that was pretty much of an outdoor assignment because the people there because it's so hot they live in houses that are open halfway to the, so there's only a half of a wall on two sides and on one side there's no wall at all, so they can capture the ocean breezes. It's a little bit like what a lot of Americans do when they go camping they want to be in the outdoors, they just want to have a roof over their head and to keep the rain out. We were outdoors a lot and it rained so hard that umbrellas were useless. They had a wonderful practice where if you were drenched on your way to someone's house, then you just borrowed some clothes from them.
Carole Chabries:I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle and I had a roommate who used to joke that it never really rained very hard in Seattle, but by the end of the day your underwear was wet. There are places where the rain is just so persistent that being wet is just status quo. That's right. That's right, yes, Okay, so that's where you started. Let's come full circle, at least to the present moment. Tell us about your book, the Essential Questions, tell us how the work came to be and what it's about.
Elizabeth Keating:The Essential Questions is a very different project from projects that I've done before. Well, I've always been interested in narrative. I'm a linguistic anthropologist, meaning I concentrate on language and culture as my specialty. It's a rather small field in anthropology, but the University of Texas Austin has a specialty in it Because I was always interested in language. I've always been interested in narrative. Of course, narrative is a great way that any anthropologist learns anything and tells anything, and people tell things. Some people say the real structure of a narrative is very, very simple the baby cried, the mommy picked it up and that's the story. We can make narratives out of lots of things. I've always been interested in stories, but I haven't studied them per se. I've studied other things, like how people express status and power relationships through language and how gender gets expressed through language and so forth, but I hadn't ever looked at narrative.
Elizabeth Keating:The inciting moment was really the death of my mother. When my mother died and I was going through her things and doing all of those tasks afterwards that are so difficult to do, I realized that there was so much that I didn't know about her. I came to realize when she wasn't just there, that there was a sense of her that was missing, that had a lot of mystery to it, if you will, and a presence that I wish I'd understood better. She had been through some really interesting times in her life. Like many people in her generation. I had never even asked her about what it was like to grow up as a child in her time. The thing is that I had interviewed her a few years before she died because I thought there were things that I wanted to know and I would wish that I had known, but I asked all the wrong things. So I based all the questions on what I already knew, and then I realized that I needed a better framework to find out the things that I was missing when she was gone.
Elizabeth Keating:So I started interviewing people. I interviewed people all over the US and in the UK and in Europe and Hong Kong and lots of different places Japan and I wanted to understand what a good set of questions would be, and I decided to base these questions on what an anthropologist would want to know when I went to the small island in the Pacific. What sort of things would I need to know to understand the life there? Of course, anthropologists live alongside people and eat, sleep and behave the way they do. But and that wasn't possible, of course, in retrospect, but there was a close second that, as anthropologists do a lot of interviewing, of course, and also noticing things, observing things, and so I set up 13 questions that are very anthropologically oriented and I interviewed a lot of people and I had so much fun interviewing them, I learned so much and they talked to me about all kinds of aspects of history I had no idea about.
Elizabeth Keating:You know, we get a sense of history of being the same for everybody in a certain time period, but you start to talk with different people and you realize, of course it was incredibly different and people have these eye witness accounts that are very, very powerful. And I was having so much fun interviewing people that I decided to ask my students, as one of their class projects, to interview one of their grandparents, and they just loved the project. They brought back to class the most wonderful stories and some of them I've included in the book because they were just so striking, and the students were really happy to give me permission to use the stories or the little snippets of their papers, really. And then things from my own interviews, but the amazing bridges that they built between generations.
Elizabeth Keating:They said things like I've never had this kind of a conversation with my grandparent before and I think never having this conversation like is what happens when you sit down with somebody and really wanna know something about their experience, especially experiences that are, for the most part, there's a lot we can say that are positive about them our childhoods I know some people have had really, really disturbing childhoods, but for most people they look back on childhood with fondness and with a lot of affection for different people that they met in their childhood and different things that and amazement still for things that happened to them.
Elizabeth Keating:They're good stories, so people have a wealth of stories and what the questions do is they set them up to tell these stories by asking really open-ended questions, and I think that's really the key. I don't know that anybody really loves being interviewed because it's. Of course you're never sure whether you're going to give the person what they're looking for, but if it's an open-ended question and you just are a good receptor of whatever they have to say, then they'll find lots of interesting things to tell you.
Carole Chabries:That feels like brief meta commentary on the whole podcast situation. Thank you for being interviewed, so I would love to hear these questions. I'm worried that if I ask you to tell us the questions, then it'll start to feel like a list and that won't be the most useful thing to listen to. I can give you some examples. Yeah, so the problem with giving people just the?
Elizabeth Keating:questions is, in each chapter there's some background on the questions and there's some background on the anthropological topic of that question. So, for example, one of the most fun questions to ask is what was the house you grew up in like? Or what was the home you grew up in like, what was the apartment you grew up in like, and that's it. That's the question. And people start out by describing how many bedrooms it had and whether there was a big kitchen or a small kitchen, or whether there was a laundry room, or whether there was a study or upstairs and downstairs, and they start out very simply, descriptively, like that, and soon they're telling you that, well, the basement was where their mother did the wash. And every time, every day when they came home from school, if it was a Wednesday and it was wash day, they went down to the basement and it was their job to feed all the clothes through the ringer part of the washer and help their mother to hang them out. And so it's interesting to ask them a little bit about that process. What was the wash day like and what was it like to be helping their mother? And the way they tell it too. They tell it with such satisfaction that they were a big part of the household and such a big help and that they knew exactly what to do and that there was a certain schedule to all the chores. And they might say that beside the front door was a rifle, because they had cattle and there were sometimes different predators lurking around the cattle and their mother. If their father was out working on the farm, it was the mother that had to take the gun and safeguard the livestock and things like that.
Elizabeth Keating:Really nice stories about going barefoot from May to September in Arkansas and remembering the bombing in World War II in London lots of things that get told when you're talking about the house. So really it starts out being very small. I remember a woman who grew up in Iceland told me that she and her brother slept with her parents, and that came after I asked how were the kids divided up in the bedrooms? And then she added my mother used to use the knitting machine at night and I can still remember the sound of the knitting machine going as we were falling asleep. So scenes like that recreate a life, as a house itself doesn't, but all the activities in the house of course do, and there's all sorts of quirky stuff about everybody's house.
Elizabeth Keating:I also ask people about things like clothing in the body. So what was their favorite thing to wear? Or did they get into trouble with their parents about their hair when they were a teenager? And someone even told me that in the 50s the kids used to wear just what their parents wore. So the boys would wear little suits and ties. That's what the dads wore. And then the 60s came on and there emerged something called youth culture, where youth wear something completely different now and things like that. That you really probably you read it in a book somewhere, but it didn't make as big an impression as the site of the distinction in those two generations, just based on their clothes.
Carole Chabries:I love the idea that people start with something really structural and straightforward and get quickly into emotions. Yeah, that must make this process really fascinating.
Elizabeth Keating:It is, and I think the home is especially a repository of family and culture and memory. Do you have?
Carole Chabries:other favorite questions you wanna share? Are there other questions that are kind of that will pique people's interest?
Elizabeth Keating:My favorite question to hear the students tell about was the one about kinship and marriage, because that led to a question about courtship practice and those have really changed. And sometimes their grandparents would say things like I've never talked about this to anybody because it was way back when they were, before they met granddad, and they just haven't had occasion to talk about it. That's another thing about these stories is there are stories that people have forgotten. They have many, many times people told me and told my students that I haven't thought about this in years and years and I thought I'd even forgotten about it.
Carole Chabries:Wow, I grew up with my grandparents a lot not constantly, but a lot and I thought I knew a lot about them, but I'm realizing now how much I don't know. I'm taken with this idea that there are stories people have forgotten they have, and I'm thinking about what this looks like on a campus. One of the things that interested me about your work was imagining well, not even imagining, but remembering the number of times I've sat in meetings when I've had a fairly parapatetic career, so I've been new a lot, and which means I've sat in a lot of rooms listening to people tell me who they are, who our campus is. You know, here's what our college is about, here's what our department is about, and I'm also a peer reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission, and the same thing is true when I go on peer review visits.
Carole Chabries:Everybody on a campus will say our campus is unique and you have to understand what's special about us. And then they tell you something or several, some things that is virtually identical to what everybody else says. So I feel like we have this sense of ourselves on our campus and in our communities that we are distinct and atypical and special in some way, but those actually aren't the stories we tell? The stories we tell seem to be a little more general and a little more universal. Almost everywhere you go you'll hear some divide between faculty and administration. Nobody special except the people at the campuses that don't have that divide. Those are the special ones.
Carole Chabries:But it occurred to me that when leaders step into a new environment much like an anthropologist steps into a new field site it's a chance to actually really learn, and, and maybe the best way to learn is not through what I think of, kind of, is the standard listening tour where you go around and you ask everybody what they care about and what's on their mind. But maybe the best way to learn what the campus community is is to ask different questions than we typically ask. And so I'm wondering, I'm wondering what you make of that from your position as an anthropologist, and if there is something transferable in what you've been able to bring to life in family and domestic relationships that you think could help us as we get to know campuses and also as we tell our stories as people who build their entire professional lives on a campus.
Elizabeth Keating:That's a really, really excellent observation. I think it's absolutely true and probably when visitors come and hear these different unique stories, they think, oh, this is, this is kind of the typical thing people say when they are introducing themselves. I think it can sometimes just be an introduction ritual, so it doesn't really give them a sense of the place at all or a sense of of some of its special approaches to things. I think that what the questions they need to ask are and this might seem strange, but they're the ordinary life questions. So the thing that I miss the most about my grandparents histories and not knowing them was what everyday life was. Life. I have a sense of what the big rituals were like, because those were well covered, but it's the ordinary life, the ordinary discouragements, the ordinary joys that I really don't know. And people think, oh, these are ordinary and so everybody shares them. But actually they don't. And anthropologists are always concentrating on the ordinary Because, if you think about it, what creates culture is not the ritual you have once in your life, but it's the rituals that you have every day, the so called everyday rituals. They are much more spontaneous and interesting. So if you wanted to find out about a special aspects of a campus.
Elizabeth Keating:I think one thing to do would be to try to devise some questions that would get at what are ordinary things that students at the University of Texas Austin do, and what is an ordinary first year? What happens during your first year? What happens during your first month? What happens in your first day? What's an ordinary first day on campus? And then you could also ask what their typical schedule is. In other words, what's a typical day? Like I know, my students' days are pretty diverse. They have classes that they go to, but they also have different student organizations they're part of and after school activities.
Elizabeth Keating:I think you could use similar questions too, like asking about what interactions were like, what your sense of time is like, and that's one of the questions that I ask in the book. It's an odd question, but time is a very interesting cultural feature. We think time is shared everywhere the same, but different cultures have really different ideas of time and what time is, and some of them don't even measure time. They certainly don't measure time the way we do, in little milliseconds, and make people adhere so strongly to a kind of rigid, agreed upon point in time. So ideas of time must be very different on a college campus. I think that's kind of what we look back on.
Carole Chabries:I'm fascinated by this, so I'm curious about what sort of answers your students got when they asked that question. I'm trying to imagine how the answers to that question would vary from campus to campus if they're all in the US, where we do measure time in one way. So I'd love to hear some of what opened up for you when those questions got asked.
Elizabeth Keating:With the time question it also got personal pretty fast because time for a child became a series of things that you had to do. So people very often said or the weekends went very fast but the weekdays went very slow, summers went very fast but the school year went very slow. Or they would say my life was all school and music, or after school I was free to go out into the fields with my friends, and so it became a sense of time as an experience of what sort of activity was expected or not expected, and there was a great deal of joy about those periods of time where there weren't any expectations. I think that's what the summer and the weekends people would measure time by, when they were free of the chores and things like that.
Carole Chabries:I love that response. I'm backwards projecting, thinking about how different people I've known on campuses would have answered that question, and the thing that strikes me is, I think, especially in the last three years, if you were to ask most faculty and staff about the time they spent on campus, they would tell you stories about being burned out, being overworked. They would talk about workload. They would talk about physical safety and kind of fear, being separated from people and what it was like to try and do your job. And I feel like there's a way in which we've come to accept that that's how it was for most folks, so we don't really hear it anymore. We know everybody was overworked and everyone was scared. We know everyone was burned out.
Carole Chabries:It would be really different if I were coming to a new campus and I am going to draw on student affairs for a moment, because they're so immersed in students' day-to-day experiences. So it would be really different to have somebody in student affairs say to me as the new leader we're really overworked, we need more time, right, that would be one thing and I would think, okay, so you sound like everyone else. But if they said to me, if I asked them a question about how they spend their times and they told me stories about all the evenings and weekends they spend responding to student calls or the students who just lost their home and they had to help that student find an apartment. If they were telling me the details that make up their day, I would start to internalize and understand and probably empathize very differently, because the stories would be so particular and also moving.
Elizabeth Keating:Yeah, exactly.
Carole Chabries:In a way that I was busy or I lived through the depression are just answers that we kind of hear and we don't really feel that's right, don't really feel yeah, that's it.
Elizabeth Keating:I think that would give people a sense of awe really for a lot of what goes on on the campus that's invisible, even asking faculty.
Carole Chabries:Tell me how you spend your days Would give you a window into what is a teaching and research and service workload truly like, and you would start to see differences between faculty who have young children and faculty who are caring for aging parents and faculty who are unpartnered, and the inequalities and injustices would emerge through telling you about their live. Okay, I totally want to go back to school and become an anthropologist so fascinating to me. There's a whole study to do about how to use this as a campus leader. I'm super intrigued by this. I want to ask you about something you said, though. You talked about people expressing a sense of joy, about the time that they had that was free, that the time where there's no expectation. Where in these stories were you surprised to hear people talk about something or recall something with joy? Where did joy come up and kind of catch you?
Elizabeth Keating:That's an interesting question. I think it came up when they talked about family. They said things like I hope that young people know how much we love us and I hope young people understand how much we have experienced and how much we care and how much we've struggled. Really, struggle was a lot of it. That's not joy, but the joy came from having the delight at the next generation having so much more than they had. And that was true in almost every case, especially the families in Texas, because the Texas period during the time of the student's grandparents was a time of poverty for a lot of people. A lot of their grandparents described how they had two shirts and one pair of pants and maybe one summer shoes and one winter shoes, but they never felt poor. They always added that they didn't feel poor. And people in the UK told me the same thing that they never felt poor because they had what everyone else had. And one person told me about the joy she remembers going to a birthday party in the UK and each birthday goer was given a brand new pencil and she was so happy to go home with that brand new pencil. That was really something back then. That was just in the war days.
Elizabeth Keating:I think that the joy came through the struggle. I would say, in spite of it, or because of it, even in some cases, that they had a surprise gift really. One person described to me that she became the age to go into the brownies, the junior Girl Scouts, and there was no cloth. So what her mother did was took one of her father's shirts and dyed it brown for her and she said that shows you how important the uniform was. But of course there was a lot of joy in that, you know, surviving in a way.
Elizabeth Keating:So I would say that, and also the freedom of roaming around. And that also is in contrast to what they see, their own grandchildren. Now they, you know, they don't go anywhere on their own and they say, oh, we just got up to all kinds of things by ourselves, you know. And they would describe they would go out into the barn and they would get some old lumber and put a bunch of things together and build a go cart and go down the hill and nobody even looked after them. You know, nobody thought twice about it. If they came home with a skin knee they would get a band-aid or something. It was, it was nothing traumatic. So you know, they do see that young people are parented in the for the most part in a kinder way than they were. I mean, I'm making a lot of generalizations here, but it was reported quite often that parents were very strict. There was corporal punishment. They're grateful that they're that people are really taking care with kids in a different way now.
Carole Chabries:Thinking about parents being both stricter and also not caring if you come home after dark with a skin knee, having built a go cart out of scrap heaps.
Elizabeth Keating:Yeah, it's true.
Carole Chabries:It also makes me wonder. I hope I hope somebody somewhere will do this longitudinal study, but I think about so. I have teenagers and my teenagers. One of them doesn't even want to learn to drive, and I'm told by other parents of kids her age their kids don't want to learn to drive either.
Carole Chabries:This is a generation that actually treats their own physical mobility really differently, and also I think so many people our generation probably, you know, the generations that are becoming parents now are thinking about the future that we're leaving to our children really differently, like I don't know how many generations it will take before people are no longer saying the next generation is going to have it better. You know, none of us know with what climate change will bring and what the next presidential election will bring. We can't see what the future will look like, but it seems likely that in the next 100 years things will be significantly harder than they have been for some of us, and so I'm curious about what that sine curve looks like over generations, as the youth and counter world that's changing, but not necessarily only are always for the better.
Elizabeth Keating:People talked a lot about regretting not being able to get an education, and I think that was beyond a lot of people in two or three generations ago, but nowadays it's really within reach. So I think there are some things that are getting much better.
Carole Chabries:I didn't mean to be completely doom and gloom. Yeah, yeah.
Elizabeth Keating:Yeah, I know, but I really I think it's true. There is so much worry, of course, because we have so such great tools now to project the future.
Carole Chabries:You're right. We have for better and worse, I think greater accuracy and seeing what's coming. So, Elizabeth, what happened I asked you that you wanna talk about?
Elizabeth Keating:I really want to share that most people have no idea what they don't know yet about their own families, and I really hope that people, whatever the mechanism they use or whatever the strategy they use, they will get to know people better in their family through these anthropologically focused questions, so that they can see what a rich history they each have. And I know that you're focused on leadership. I really think that something that can make you a more powerful leader in terms of confidence and authority is understanding the experiences and struggles and the amazing things that your elders did and the people did before you and your mothers, and you would really be surprised at things that you have never really thought that were part of their lives and that they accomplish, because when they're with us, they usually focus on us, don't they? They focus a generation or two down. That's where the conversation goes, and they never get a chance to talk about themselves.
Carole Chabries:So coming into leadership with the humility and curiosity not only about more open ways to understand your own campus environment, but also your own past and the people who have been important in shaping you.
Elizabeth Keating:That's right, and I'm not saying everyone was someone, who is necessarily someone who will have achieved something similar, but there are, and were, many leadership challenges that people have that aren't called leadership and that they're demonstrating all the time in these stories, and they have a way of describing a past that's gone, and I think we really need to be aware of our past in order to be sensible about the present, and the more we know about the past, the better. I'm becoming more and more interested in history the older I get. Our own families have this eye witness to history A person telling a story about your own family or about their own experiences after the war or during the war, or their own experiences getting into college. Maybe they were the first one in the family to get into college. Imagine that my mother was the first one in her family to go to college and I wish I had asked her more about it. What was it like to arrive on campus that first day and how did she feel?
Carole Chabries:and many other questions I love the reminder that part of leading is emotional intelligence and kind of looking. You see emotional intelligence in all sorts of quotidian events. You see people getting through hardships in life with creativity and grace and compassion and that even if it doesn't look like leadership, there's a lesson there.
Elizabeth Keating:That's right, because as the leader, you're responsible for a lot of followers and the better you understand people and it enables you better to be a leader.
Elizabeth Keating:I think we concentrate so much on leadership qualities but the quality of knowing the other, which is another thing that anthropology is good at. We're always trying to understand the perspective of the other. So I should say, to emphasize it, that the approach in the essential questions is to take the position of the person you're interviewing, in other words, to inhabit their experience in your imagination as much as you can. And so when you're doing the interview, you don't volunteer your own opinion and only give feedback that's the acknowledgement kind, so that they won't be inhibited about sharing things with you. The idea is, as the interviewer, to be as open as you can so that people will share with you.
Elizabeth Keating:Even I've told my students, even if they're telling you things that go against your own ideas of, say, gender roles or authority, what is authority, and so forth it's important to understand their position. So you should ask more about it, not less if it's something that you disagree with. And that's how we can in anthropology. That's how we can at least make a fair attempt, I think, to understand cultural differences and different worldviews.
Carole Chabries:I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the things I was struck by looking at your materials is the idea that when you're listening to someone tell their story, you're giving them the autonomy and integrity and respect of their experience. And so often when we talk and I've done this with you for the last hour you will tell me something and I'll say, oh, that's just like, or that makes me think about. Right, I am interjecting myself, I'm not being the kind of empathetic, inhabiting listener that you're describing, and we don't usually do that, and that must be a real skill. I hope that's part of training in anthropology, because most of us don't go through life that way. But to once again bring this back to leadership, what a different way of listening to people when you ask them questions, to give them all the space they need and to inhabit that space alongside them. I love that reminder.
Elizabeth Keating:Yes, and there's a whole chapter in the essential questions about interviewing and some tips on interviewing. Of course, there are really different kinds of interviews, and podcasts are more of a conversation than an interview. Really, that's what the format is, but in this case sometimes people will hold back things to their own family if they think they might be perceived as too risque or maybe not in the same character as they were perceived before. But the students loved it. They loved hearing about their escapades and that made them seem much more approachable and they were able to have much more intimate conversations with them.
Carole Chabries:Okay, so I am gonna put myself in the position of a listener for a minute. I would be totally intrigued by learning more about you. So you mentioned your book is low priced right now on Amazon. It's published by Penguin, so people can find it at Penguin. Where else can people learn about either you and what you do or the kinds of work that you're describing, if they decide they wanna dig in and learn some more about this?
Elizabeth Keating:They can learn more about me at my website, which is elizabeth-keatingcom. They can learn about me more at the University of Texas there's lots of material online from the University of Texas, austin. And they can learn more about anthropology by checking with the American Association of Anthropologists we call it the AAA American Anthropological Association and there's a lot of material on their website. And, of course, if you wanna take a course at your local school in anthropology, also check on your local library shelf to what they have on anthropology. There are some very interesting accounts of different cultures that are fun to read. When, just in order to expand our minds, with just the very creativity of human symbolic behavior, it's astonishing.
Carole Chabries:I feel a little self-conscious saying this, but it would never have occurred to me to go look up anthropology as reading material, but I will now. So thank you for that, that's great. Elizabeth, I am so grateful for your time. I am so glad that you did this work and put the book together, and I just wanna express my gratitude and appreciation for you being with us today.
Elizabeth Keating:Well, thank you very much for the pleasure of talking about this and pleasure of talking with you.
Carole Chabries:Okay, now that I've talked to Elizabeth, I am really feeling pretty serious about transferring this idea of open-ended, empathetic questions from family histories to leadership on college campuses. I'm not sure exactly what to do with this, but for starters, I'd love to know if it resonates with you. I'm thinking something like a guide for new leaders that uses the spirit of anthropological questioning to learn more about your new campus and colleagues, a way to radically reconfigure the listening tour. So do me a favor. Would you Message me and let me know whether you'd find something like that helpful, and if I decide to do it and I'm super lucky maybe Elizabeth will collaborate with me on it. All right, my friends, see you next time. Well, bye now.