If you’re interested in knowing what a day in the life of an academic who’s also a YouTuber looks like stay tuned because this is going to be the topic of this video.
Hello everyone. I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magic, Paganism, Shamanism, Esotericism, and all things occult.
Today’s video is brought to you by Regulus, a kind friend of the symposium who commissioned this video. So today it will be more of a chatty video explaining to you a few things about my life as a university lecturer and as a person who’s on YouTube and I have a few things that Regulus asked me to address.
The first thing is a day in the life, you know, what my day looks like and that’s a bit difficult because, as you may expect, my days change quite a bit. But there are certain things that recur and are kind of the same. So I tend to wake up very, very early, earlier than I’d like to admit, and the first thing that I do is I work on the most demanding task, which is either something related to writing, like for an academic publication or writing a script for a video or preparing a lecture that I’m going to deliver. Usually, the most demanding and the most difficult task of the day is the one that I do straight out of bed. Straight out of bed I have my breakfast and I do the first most important thing and then after I do that, after I complete that task, I hit the gym because, yeah you may not know, but I really like working out and not only because it makes me feel good but also because it helps me stay focused, so I find it quite helpful in my job as well. After that I usually, if I have to give lectures at the university, I will do so, I will have to go to the university before the pandemic and now I would be online. We use Microsoft Teams at my institution as I’d say most universities in the UK.
So either I go on campus to deliver the lecture in person or I stay at home and I do so on Microsoft Teams. And then, apart from that, I usually study a lot. So I guess that most of my days are not as exciting because I have to read a lot, as you may imagine, for both for my job at university and for you guys for the Symposium and when I read, of course, I acquired the knowledge to prepare a script or prepare a lecture or I do research for a peer-reviewed publication that I’m working on. Usually, I’m always working on something of that sort, on some on some academic publication because you know what they say, publish or perish. So you need to, in order for you to stay in the game, you need to be constantly producing academic knowledge and produce research. The kind of research that I do for my publications is very similar to the one that I do for my script. I don’t know if you notice that there is a difference between the YouTube videos that are based on my own publications and the videos that are not based on something that I have published. Usually, when I try and avoid doing my own interpretation on primary sources. I mean texts that practitioners produce or use for their own practical, magic purposes. Usually, I prefer to rely on peer-reviewed scholarship so that I can give you the most accurate knowledge I can based on what I can the academic methodology suggests. And otherwise, if I were to give you my own interpretation on one specific magical text magical grimoire or another that would have to go through peer review in order for my video to keep the kind of standard, methodological standard that I want them to have. And I know that is a bit limiting and but for now, I really want to keep the methodology for my videos quite strict and I am aware that that can perhaps hinder the growth of my channel but equally, I can also see that it allows for my YouTube channel to keep the academic community engaged as well and that is also important to me.
Also, what kind of resources do I use to do research for my videos? I’d say the same kind of resources that I use for my publications or for my own studies. So usually they are having an academic affiliation and working at a university allows me to access the university library and other university’s libraries. I can ask for books to be lent to me and also I can have access to digital databases – search engines that allow me to get access to a peer-reviewed scholarship and to different research outputs. So I guess that that is another reason as to why I think that having a university affiliation helps me in my work on this channel because it allows me to access a very wide variety of sources. A few search engines that you can also use, in case you were interested, are Google Scholar and JSTOR and yeah, these are free.
On JSTOR you will only find academic articles and scholarship. On Google Scholar you can find both books that are academic and books that are really not. But in that case, it’s really important for you to tell the difference between the two and usually, the difference is that the book is published by an academic publisher and you can tell by looking up the publisher. So all the university presses are academic publishers and that’s very clear and you can immediately tell. But there are other, very famous, academic publishers that are like, for instance, in the field of Esotericism you have Brill, Brill is very famous. Then you have Bloomsbury, Equinox, Routledge and other academic publishers and you can tell whether they are academic publishers because when you look them up on their website they will state the peer review process and when something is peer-reviewed it means that it is academic because… And you may ask why is peer review so important? And that is because, despite what we normally think in our society and that is if one person is reliable and has credentials then what that person says is also reliable that is actually a logical fallacy and what I usually stress, even with my students, and hopefully that has come across, in the past, in my videos, is that you shouldn’t really rely on the person because that’s not really how science works it’s not how research works. It’s not, you know, you don’t get people peer-reviewed you get specific studies to be reviewed. There could be a total genius and produce one study that is extremely impactful and that I could produce all rubbish afterwards for the rest of my life. It’s not the fact that I may conduct a research that is particularly impactful and particularly accurate and it doesn’t really mean that every other research that I produce will live up to that standard or live up to an academic standard at all.
So the reason why the peer-review process is important is that it highlights the fact that science and academic research is based on the community, on the community of scientists and the community of scholars. It’s not based on the findings of one specific individual, one specific scientist because, as you know, as much as you can be a genius you will only have limited resources, limited time, and a limited scale for your own study. So if your study doesn’t prove to be at least in alignment with other studies in the same field, that have been conducted with a similar methodology, if it is in complete contrast with everything that has been found in similar studies by other scholars then it may mean that, perhaps, there’s something wrong with your methodology and with your findings or with the kind of data analysis that you used. So peer review process and in general, I’d say that science is based on a communication between your own individual study, or the study of your specific laboratory, and the wider body of knowledge and body of findings that you have in that specific field. And that’s how knowledge advances really. It’s not by individuals but it is by connecting and comparing and putting together the small amount of knowledge that I was able to acquire because I am only one person or only one laboratory. I can put it in communication with the other findings from other scholars and that’s how knowledge progresses really. Not by the one genius which is, you know, a famous character because even those who are geniuses they may indeed have very disputable beliefs and that obviously includes me so that’s why I think it’s much more important to focus on the methodology and the peer review process and how that specific study relates to the wider body of knowledge and findings, rather than rely on one specific individual. And you may prefer one specific person in terms of teaching, for instance, because perhaps the way one person conveys knowledge may be more appealing to you or you may find that a specific way of disseminating information may be more understandable to you.
So then another question from Regulus is; what was the first topic you became interested enough in to do serious academic research for?
Magic. As you can tell from this YouTube channel, my main interest and what I’m most interested in is Magic and how it relates to different philosophies and different religious practices and different religious beliefs. But my core interest is really Magic and what it is and the way people have conceptualized magic. And you may ask, why is Magic so fascinating to you? Because, to me, Magic is a way whereby human beings can access and try and interact with what lies beyond. And it’s also fascinating to me how Magic has been interpreted differently across history. Like in some cases you have this idea that Magic is a tool to affirm your individual power over the circumstances. But in other cases, you have the idea that Magic is just the natural and unavoidable result of your spiritual development like you have in Yoga. Or, in other cases, you may have the concept and the idea that Magic results from being in a state of connectedness with everything that surrounds you.
So I guess I’m just fascinated because Magic is a way to challenge the extent of our agency as human beings and not only in terms of what we can do but, perhaps most importantly to me, the extent of what we can experience, how much can we experience. Can we only experience with our bodies or there are other ways of experiencing the world and navigate our lives? So that is very fascinating to me. So I say that Magic has always been my core interest but obviously, that has been declared in many different ways in my academic journey.
So you know that I have studied Shamanism for my PhD and the vernacular-healing tradition in Italy, folk witchcraft, paganism, and now I’m studying, I’m working on a paper on, Spiritism and I will also do further a study on Satanism and these are all located in Italy because when you do academic research you have to be very specific, especially if you do anthropological research on the contemporary world. You cannot just do Satanism. You have to be specific on one tradition in a one specific place. Otherwise, when things are too generic they just end up meaning nothing. So it’s important too for the academic research to provide accurate information and so you need to be very narrow in your inquiry to get accurate information.
Then, how much time does it take to write your video scripts and record your videos? So it takes a lot of time. The bare minimum is two days if I already have the research done on a specific topic and that is often the case, especially during semester, when I’m teaching. I try to use material from my lectures to turn them into videos but the bare minimum is two days. When I already have research done because I have to write a script, and that takes, it depends, but usually, four or five hours and then I have to film the video and that often you know takes more than one take because I’m not that good. And then there’s the editing process and then you have the uploading and adding all of the tags and all the things on YouTube so that once you see the final version, on Sunday, of my videos all of those stages need to have been completed.
Now I’m quite happy to get help from one of my patrons who is Andrew [ :)]. Thank you, Andrew, for making the subtitles for my videos. So that’s one thing that luckily I don’t have to do but I’m definitely glad that I that now there are also subtitles to my videos.
Then when I also have to do research for videos when, for instance, these are commissioned videos or I’m trying to do a video on a topic that I’m not teaching on at the moment or that I have never written a paper, like an academic paper, on it, it may take up to a week because it obviously depends on how much background knowledge I have on the topic and how much scholarship there is that I need you to read and put together. But like, for instance, the video on Tantra and Sex Magick and the video on Houdou, those videos took almost a week to be made. So, yeah, when I have to do dedicated research for a topic it can take up to a week. So it takes a lot of time guys. So I’m really happy that you acknowledge that and do know that every time that you like or comment or share my videos that really helps me grow and helps me keep making more videos for you guys and if you can at all help I always appreciate if you can send one-off donations or pledge to my Patreon.
Then when I also have to do research for videos when, for instance, these are commissioned videos or I’m trying to do a video on a topic that I’m not teaching on at the moment or that I have never written a paper, like an academic paper, on it, it may take up to a week because it obviously depends on how much background knowledge I have on the topic and how much scholarship there is that I need you to read and put together. But like, for instance, the video on Tantra and Sex Magick and the video on Hoodoo, those videos took almost a week to be made. So, yeah, when I have to do dedicated research for a topic it can take up to a week. So it takes a lot of time guys. So I’m really happy that you acknowledge that and do know that every time that you like or comment or share my videos that really helps me grow and helps me keep making more videos for you guys and if you can at all help I always appreciate if you can send one-off donations or pledge to my Patreon.
Then Regulus also ask whether I can explain what a peer-reviewed article is and, basically, a peer-reviewed article is an article that has to go through the peer-review process. And the way this works is that once you have conducted this study and you have written it down in an article form you will send it to the editor of a specific journal, of an academic journal. And they will send it to two, typically, two or one reviewer for evaluation. They will not know who you are and you will never know who they are, luckily for them, and the outcome of the peer review process is that either your article gets rejected or it gets accepted with amendments or it gets accepted without amendments. So I have never heard of a person, that I know, that got accepted an article without amendments. So, typically, you do get to amend your work before resubmitting your article because there are always going to be things that the reviewers will find in your study that need improvement. In some cases, you may need to conduct further research to have more data to prove one point or to argue in favour of a specific thesis. But in other cases, you may need to do more textual analysis or more textual research or amend something in your methodology. It really depends, it depends on the kind of article and it depends on the journal and it depends on many things. But yeah usually reviewers don’t know who you are, it is all anonymous. And then once you get back from them and hopefully the result is that your article is accepted with amendments you apply them you will have a certain amount of time to apply the amendments and do the further research, in case that is needed and then you resubmit the article. So as I was mentioning earlier, the peer review process puts your own single study in communication with the web of knowledge that is being produced within the academic community studying that specific subject matter and, in this way, you can have a confirmation that your methodology is good and that your knowledge is accurate. And, of course, I’m not saying that the peer review process is perfect by any stretch of the imagination but I do think that it is a very good way of assessing the accuracy of a specific study.
And then the last question is; do you have a sense of where research into Esotericism and Magic is headed in the near future? So I have already kind of mentioned on my Instagram that I was quite pleased when I went recently to the conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions that took place at the University of Pisa because I could see that there were a few panels on Esotericism and they were all well attended and received and that was not quite the case in the past. So my hope, it might be that I’m optimistic by nature, but my hope is that the field is developing further we are getting more scholars in the field and there is more attention to this field. So I hope that in the future we will have more departments teaching and researching esoteric related topics at the university level. And that there will be more funding to conduct this kind of research because, at the moment, that is quite scarce as you can imagine but we are trying to hold on. And yeah, and hope for a better future for these fields because as you guys also show me by following this channel and watching my videos, it’s quite clear that there is an interest in the academic study of Esotericism. Some of you may be interested in the academic study of Magic because you want to improve your own magical practice but it could also be the case that you are following this channel because you want to carry out this kind of research in the future and I hope that, if that is the case, you will be able to to find a place.
And since this is a video on my daily life as a university lecturer plus YouTuber, I guess one of the things that I like to say as a final note is that I hope to find a balance between work and life because I think that so far it’s been too unbalanced and I’ve been working too much and that is because I’m really passionate about what I do and I’m trying, in a way, find a way to make this my job. I’m not talking just about YouTube but of course, working at the university and for early-career scholars, it’s very difficult to find a stable place. I’ve been working very long hours and quite often I don’t even take the weekends off. And, yeah, I hope that in the future that will change – in the near future, that will change because I do need to find a balance and don’t feel like if I stop everything will fall apart, which is and the way I feel often. But, yeah, thank you for listening so far. I hope it was not too boring and I thank again Regulus for commissioning this video.
I think that yeah perhaps you may have liked it. I hope so, let me know in the comments.
What else can I say? That if you did like this video, you may want to SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new upload from me and as always, stay tuned for the academic fun.
Bye for now.
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