Free Thinking

By BBC Radio 4Society & Culture

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Free Thinking episodes

November 15, 2018 Buses, beer and VR - a taste of university research.
A 3,000 year old Iranian ritual, archaeology on a council estate, and London's Greek Cypriot community: Matthew Sweet hops on the 29 bus route, puts on some VR glasses, and visits the hospital which was home to "the Elephant Man" as he talks to researchers showcasing their projects at the 2018 Being Human Festival.
Petros Karatsareas and Athena Mandis guide Matthew through the moves made by the Greek Cypriot diaspora in London along the 29 bus route.
Carenza Lewis and Ian Waites of the University of Lincoln explain why they've organised an archaeological dig on a 1960s council estate.
Nadia Valman and Karen Crosby are organising a slide projection onto the walls of the Royal London Hospital
Living Zoroastrianism is an exhibition on show at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS (until December 15th) in which Virtual Reality allows visitors to experience a 3,000 year old ritual from pre-Islamic Iran, stages by Almut Hintze and Anna Sowa
You can find events around the UK in the Being Human Festival of research into the Humanities here https://beinghumanfestival.org/
Producer: Luke Mulhall
51 min
November 14, 2018 Death rituals
From death cafes to bronze age burials, C19th mourning rings to the way healthcare professionals cope when patients die. Eleanor Barraclough looks at research showcased in the Being Human Festival at UK universities.
Laura O'Brien at Northumbria University is running a death cafe and looking at the way celebrities can "live on" after their death. New Generation Thinker Danielle Thom works at the Museum of London and has been researching the history behind some of the jewelry in their collection. Duncan Garrow from Reading University is leading a major research project into prehistoric grave goods. Medical historian Agnes Arnold-Forster has been asking surgeons and other health professionals about how they deal with death.
The Being Human Festival organises free events based on research into the Humanities at universities around the UK. It runs from Nov 15th - 24th 2018 https://beinghumanfestival.org/
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
46 min
November 14, 2018 Lost Words and Language
New Scots words to add to the The Dictionar o the Scots Leid and a quiz about words from medieval Ireland are 2 of the Being Human Festival projects explored by Shahidha Bari. Plus how researchers are using film to explore social history and a major new exhibition about the sculptor and painter Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993).
The Being Human Festival showcases research into the Humanities at universities around the UK. It runs from Nov 15th - 24th 2018 https://beinghumanfestival.org/
Watch the winning films from the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2018: https://bit.ly/2JYfgu2
Elisabeth Frink: Humans and Other Animals is The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia until 24th of February. You can see more work by Frink at Beaux Arts Mayfair Gallery, London until 1st December and at Tate Britain until 4 February.
You can hear New Generation Thinkers presenting the Radio 3 Sunday Feature here
https://bbc.in/2B3o7HP A Mystery about Gilbert and Sullivan. Medieval Passions and Moderm Immersive Drama.
https://bbc.in/2Fhp3wA Is it Wrong to have Children? Why Bin Laden did not like Shakespeare.
Producer: Debbie Kilbride
46 min
November 08, 2018 Why are we silent when conflict is loud?
Journalist Peter Hitchens; the Rector of St James’s Church Piccadilly Lucy Winkett; performer and director Neil Bartlett and Professor Steve Brown from the Open University join Anne McElvoy at the Imperial War Museum for their 2018 Remembrance Lecture.
In 1919, the first national silence was observed to commemorate the end of the First World War. Organised silences were designed to remember the human impact of conflict, but do twenty-first century collective silences fulfil that purpose? This debate brings together a panel of speakers to discuss the role of organised silences and what it means to be silent about conflict in 2018.
IWM’s annual remembrance lecture appears as part of Making a New World a free season of exhibitions, installations and immersive experiences taking place at IWM London and IWM North in 2018. Through art, photography, film, live music, dance and conversations, the season explores themes of remembrance and how the First World War has shaped today’s society, bringing together five major exhibitions – Lest We Forget? at IWM North and Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs, I Was There: Room of Voices, Mimesis: African Solider and Moments of Silence at IWM London.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
45 min
November 08, 2018 Butterflies and Bloodstains: Fragments of the First World War
Shahidha Bari is joined by cultural historian Ana Carden-Coyne, literary scholar Santanu Das, and Julia Neville, co-ordinator of the Exeter First World War Hospitals Project, to discuss the 1914-1918 War. Their research turns the War into a mosaic of feeling and experience, a sensory dislocation and cultural melting pot.
Dr Ana Carden-Coyne is Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War (CCHW) in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester, and author of The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War,
Santanu Das, Professor of English Literature, Kings College London. His book India, Empire and the First World War: Words, Objects, Images and Music
Is out now
Dr Julia Neville, is an Honorary Fellow in the History Department at Exeter University, and serves on the Council of the Devon History Society. She co-ordinates the Exeter War Hospitals Research Project.
This podcast was made with the assistance of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which funds research at universities and museums, galleries and archives across the UK into the arts and humanities. The AHRC works in partnership with BBC Radio 3 on the New Generation Thinkers scheme to make academic research available to a wider audience.
47 min
November 07, 2018 Landmark: Journey to the End of the Night
Better than Proust -- the man who made literature out of colloquial French -- the arch chronicler of human depravity --- some of the things that are said about Louis Ferdinand Céline, author of Journey to the End of the Night - one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.
His semi- autobiographical novel, first published in 1932, is a ferocious assault on the hypocrisy and idiocy of his time. It follows its anti hero Ferdinand Bardamu from the battlefields of the First World War to Africa and America before returning to Paris and a chilling confrontation with his demons. The book established Céline as a an original and dangerous voice amongst the generation of writers who emerged from the carnage of the Great War. The fluency of his prose, its tone and bristling attitude has won him many admirers among them Philip Roth and Joseph Heller. He's entered popular culture too -- being quoted by Jim Morrison in the Doors' song End of the Night. But as well as the praise there's been criticism - not least for the vicious anti-Semitism that surfaces in some of his later work.
To explore the novel and the man Rana Mitter is joined by the writers, Marie Darrieussecq and Tibor Fischer, the literary historian, Andrew Hussey, and Céline's latest biographer, Damian Catani.
Marie Darrieussecq is the author of novels including Pig Tales, Tom is Dead and her latest Our Life in the Forest
Andrew Hussey is the author of The French Intifada : The Long War Between France and its Arabs
Tibor Fischer is the author of the novels, How to Rule the World, Under the Frog and The Thought Gang.
Damian Catani teaches at Birkbeck College in London and is writing a biography of Céline that will be published in 2020 by Reaktion Books.
Producer: Zahid Warley
49 min
November 06, 2018 Wilfred Owen: Poetry and Peace.
Gillian Clarke, Sabrina Mahfouz and Michael Symmons Roberts respond to the war poet Wilfred Owen with their own new commissions from the Royal Society of Literature. Shahidha Bari hosts a discussion recorded with an audience at the British Library on the 100th anniversary of Owen's death during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal on 4 November 1918, exactly 7 days (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice which ended World War I.
Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke’s work has been on the GCSE and A Level exam syllabus for the past thirty years. She was the first woman to win the Wilfred Owen Award – for a sustained body of work that includes memorable war poems – in 2012.
Sabrina Mahfouz was brought up in London and Cairo, and is a playwright, poet, novelist and editor. She was elected an RSL Fellow in 2018.
Poet and Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, Michael Symmons Roberts grew up less than a mile from Greenham Common and has often written about the Cold War ‘peace’.
Producer: Fiona McLean
52 min
November 01, 2018 Re-thinking the Human Condition
Henry Hardy has written In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure Diving For Seahorses: A Journey Through the Science of Memory by Hilde Østby and Ylva Østby explores the study of memory from the Renaissance to the present day. Dafydd Daniel is a New Generation Thinker and the McDonald Lecturer in Theology and Ethics, University of Oxford.
47 min
October 31, 2018 Religious divisions, puppet shows and politics.
The exile of English Catholics 450 years ago, suffragette Punch and Judy plus Shahidha Bari interviews Kapka Kassabova, the winner of a prize for fostering global understanding.
The British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding was announced this week. The winner Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova is out in paperback.
Dr Lucy Underwood teaches at the University of Warwick and is the author of Childhood, youth and religious dissent in post-Reformation England.
Dr Caroline Bowden is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London.
Alison Shell is Professor of English at UCL. She is currently writing a monograph on ‘The Drama of the British Counter-Reformation’
New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton is running an event day at the National Theatre in London on November 17th featuring suffragette Punch and Judy. She has also helped curate - What Difference Did the War Make? World War One and Votes for Women which is on show in November in Westminster Hall, London
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
46 min
October 30, 2018 The Memes that Make Us Laugh
The memes that make us laugh - have we become meaner or can schadenfreude be a positive thing? Philosophical traditions around the world - can you outline the ideas of Nishida as well as Nietzsche? Is Japan facing a key moment of change in what it means to be Japanese? Julian Baggini, and New Generation Thinkers Tiffany Watt Smith and Christopher Harding join Rana Mitter. Plus "starchitects" - inspirational big names or a symptom of what has gone wrong with architecture? Professor James Stevens Curl and Christine Murray discuss.
Professor James Stevens Curl's most recent book is Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism.
Christine Murray is former Editor in Chief of the Architectural Review and Architect's Journal. She is founder of a new magazine The Developer.
Tiffany Watt Smith has written Schadenfraude: The Joy of Another's Misfortune.
You can find her programme about babies laughing here https://bbc.in/2OVRDbh
Julian Baggini's latest book is called How The World Thinks. You can hear him debate identity at the Free Thinking Festival https://bbc.in/2DN2Jok
Christopher Harding's book is called Japan Story. You can find his series of Radio 3 Essays: Dark Blossoms exploring aspects of Japanese cultural history https://bbc.in/2NDfAhU
and tne Free Thinking programme website has a playlist of discussions about Japanese culture https://bbc.in/2A5vnme
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select academics who can turn their research into radio.
Producer: Robyn Read
46 min

About Free Thinking

From the publisher's feed

Leading thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives - looking back at the news and making links between past and present. Fridays at 9pm on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Matthew Sweet, Shahidha Bari…