Free Thinking

A new craze for body building and that distinctive figure of the 20th century, the hobbyist, are the topic of conversation as we continue our series of features looking at cultural life in 1922. John Gallagher considers what the expansion of free time in the 1920s meant for leisure and the things people did for fun. He is joined by historian Elsa Richardson and literary scholar Jon Day.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

From health fads, to Virginia Woolf having a premonition of the microwave, New Generation Thinker John Gallagher is joined by food historians Annie Gray and Elsa Richardson

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Jade Halbert lectures in fashion, but has never done any sewing. She swaps pen and paper for needle and thread to create a dress from a Jean Muir pattern. In a diary charting her progress, she reflects on the skills of textile workers she has interviewed as part of a project charting the fashion trade in Glasgow and upon the banning of pins on a factory floor, the experiences of specialist sleeve setters and cutters, and whether it is ok to lick your chalk.

Jade Halbert is a Lecturer, Fashion Business and Cultural Studies at the University of Huddersfield. You can find her investigation into fashion and the high street as a Radio 3 Sunday Feature https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gvpn and taking part in a Free Thinking discussion called The Joy of Sewing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002mk2. She has also broadcast another Essay for Radio 3 looking at the fashion label Droopy & Browns https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014ysq

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Advances in robotics and virtual reality are giving us ever more 'realistic' ways of representing the world, but the quest for vivid

Christina Faraday is a New Generation Thinker who lectures in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge. You can hear her talking about more Tudor art in a Free Thinking discussion called The Tudor Mind and explaining her work on an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the painting of Nicholas Hilliard in a Free Thinking episode about the joy of miniatures https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002mk2

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

This Essay tells a story of political marches and everyday acts of radical care; of sledgehammers and bags of rice; of the struggles for justice waged by migrant domestic workers but it also charts the realisation of Ella Parry-Davies, that acknowledging publicly for the first time her own condition of epilepsy – or “coming out crip” – is part of the story of our blindness to inequalities in healthcare and living conditions faced by many migrant workers.

Ella Parry-Davies has a post as Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory at King’s College London. She is working on an oral history project creating sound walks by interviewing migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. You can hear her discussing her research in a Free Thinking episode called Stanley Spencer, Domestic Servants, Surrogacy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000573q

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten early career academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Robyn Read

There is fascinating evidence that 5,000 years ago, people living in Britain and Ireland had a deep and meaningful relationship with the underworld seen in the carved chalk, animal bones and human skeletons found at Cranborne Chase in Dorset in a large pit, at the base of which had been sunk a 7-metre-deep shaft. Other examples considered in this Essay include Carrowkeel in County Sligo, the passage tombs in the Boyne Valley in eastern Ireland and the Priddy Circles in the Mendip Hills in Somerset. If prehistoric people regarded the earth as a powerful, animate being that needed to be placated and honoured, perhaps there are lessons here for our own attitudes to the world beneath our feet.

Susan Greaney is a New Generation Thinker who works for English Heritage at Stonehenge and who is studying for her PhD at Cardiff University.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can hear her journey to Japan to compare the Jomon civilisations with Stonehenge as a Radio 3 Sunday Feature and there is an exhibition opening at Stonehenge in September https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hgqx

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

When Tom Smith sets out to research allegations of racism in Berlin’s club scene, he finds himself face to face with his own past in techno’s birthplace: Detroit. Visiting the music distributor Submerge, he considers the legacy of the pioneers Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, the influence of Afro-futurism and the work done in Berlin to popularise techno by figures including Kemal Kurum and Claudia Wahjudi. But the vibrant culture which seeks to be inclusive has been accused of whiteness and the Essay ends with a consideration of the experiences of clubbers depicted in the poetry of Michael Hyperion Küppers.

Tom Smith is a New Generation Thinker who lectures in German at the University of St Andrews. You can find another Essay from him called Masculinity Comrades in Arms recorded at the York Festival of Ideas 2019 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00061m5 and a New Thinking podcast discussion Rubble Culture to techno in postwar Germany https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07srdmh

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who turn their research into radio.

Producer: Robyn Read

A nurse who survived the genocide in 1994 against the Tutsi in Rwanda has written a testimony which New Generation Thinker Zoe Norridge has translated.

In Rwanda, Yolande Mukagasana is a well-known writer, public figure and campaigner for remembrance of the genocide. She has authored three testimonies, a collection of interviews with survivors and perpetrators and two volumes of Rwandan stories. Her work has received numerous international prizes, including an Honorable Mention for the UNESCO Education for Peace Prize.

Zoe Norridge, from King’s College London, argues there should be a place for Mukagasana on our shelves in UK, alongside works from the Holocaust and other genocides. Why? Because listening to survivor voices helps us to understand the human cost of mass violence.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

The novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866) brought to life a large comic heroine who bucked 19th-century conventions. New Generation Thinker Clare Walker Gore's essay outlines the prolific writing career of Margaret Oliphant and laments the way she was used by fellow novelist Virginia Woolf as a symbol of the dangers of needing to write for money to keep yourself and your family afloat.

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. You can find more conversations, features and Essays from the ten years of the scheme in a collection on the Free Thinking programme website of BBC Radio 3.

Author of the first prose romance published in England in 1621, her reputation at court was ruined by her thinly veiled autobiographical writing. Visit the family home, Penshurst Place in Kent, and you can see Lady Mary Wroth's portrait, but New Generation Thinker Nandini Das says you can also find her in the pages of her book The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, which places centre stage women who "love and are not afraid to love." Scandal led to her withdrawing it from sale and herself from public life.

If you are interested in more discussions about women writers you can find an Arts & Ideas podcast episode called Why We Read and the Idea of the Woman Writer which includes a discussion of both Anne Bronte and Anne Dowriche. And there is a collection of programmes about women writers on the Free Thinking programme website

Producer: Torquil MacLeod