Free Thinking

Sex strikes suggested by Suffragettes, a theatre company devoted to exploring the experiences of women in the UK prison system and the campaign to make women's rights at the heart of human rights and its links with socialist Eastern Europe: Naomi Paxton finds out about new research into women's history.

Her guests are:

Tania Shew specialises in the history of feminist thought. She's currently a Scouloudi Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research working on sex strikes and birth strikes as tactics in the British and American women’s suffrage movements, 1890-1920.

Dr Celia Donert is Associate Professor in Central European History at the University of Cambridge. She is writing a book exploring How Women's Rights became Human Rights: Gender, Socialism, and Postsocialism in Global History, 1917-2017.

Caoimhe Mcavinchey is Professor of Socially Engaged and Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University London. She has been working on a project Clean Break: Women, Theatre Organisation and the Criminal Justice System

Chloë Moss is a playwright who has worked with Clean Break on a number of projects.

You can see a film of Chloë's drama Sweatbox on the website https://www.cleanbreak.org.uk/

This New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research council – part of UKRI.

Presenter: Naomi Paxton

Sex strikes suggested by Suffragettes, a theatre company devoted to exploring the experiences of women in the UK prison system and the campaign to make women's rights at the heart of human rights and its links with socialist Eastern Europe: Naomi Paxton finds out about new research into women's history.

Her guests are:

Tania Shew specialises in the history of feminist thought. She's currently a Scouloudi Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research working on sex strikes and birth strikes as tactics in the British and American women’s suffrage movements, 1890-1920.

Dr Celia Donert is Associate Professor in Central European History at the University of Cambridge. She is writing a book exploring How Women's Rights became Human Rights: Gender, Socialism, and Postsocialism in Global History, 1917-2017.

Caoimhe Mcavinchey is Professor of Socially Engaged and Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University London. She has been working on a project Clean Break: Women, Theatre Organisation and the Criminal Justice System.

You can see a film of Chloë's drama Sweatbox on the website https://www.cleanbreak.org.uk/

Presenter: Naomi Paxton

The Unthank sisters, writers Lucy Holland and Oyinkan Braithwaite and historian and feminist activist Sally Alexander join Shahidha Bari for a conversation about what it means to be a sister on International Women's Day 2022. You could make a family from recent novels depicting sisterhood from Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister the Serial Killer, to Daisy Johnson's Sisters and Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half but literary sisterhood goes back via Jane Austen and the Brontës to Chekhov, King Lear's daughters, Cinderella and Greek myths about the seven sisters who formed the Pleiades, or Antigone and Ismene. And if you're looking at feminist history the idea of the sisterhood has been a cornerstone of political action. Is it right that sisters will have a particular bond and sound if they perform music together? All of this and more in tonight's Free Thinking conversation.

Producer: Kevin Core

You might also be interested in the most recent episode of Radio 3's Words and Music on Sisters, with its curated playlist of readings and music of all kinds ranging from Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Brit Bennet and Arifa Akbar to Fanny Mendelssohn, Errollyn Wallen, Hildegard of Bingen and the Labeque Sisters performing Ravel. And tomorrow's programme explores new research into women's history. And there's a playlist on the Free Thinking programme website called Women in the World

Before Them, We is a photographic project by Ruth Sutoyé and also the title of an anthology of poems in which a group of poets of African descent reflect upon the lives of their grandparents and elders and the inter-generational relationships in the families they went on to establish. Ruth and co-editor and poet Jacob Sam-La Rose talk to Matthew Sweet alongside Booker prize winning author Howard Jacobson - the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants - who has just published a memoir exploring his early life in a working-class family in 1940s Manchester where he was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce before becoming a writer.

Mother's Boy by Howard Jacobson is out now

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Leading artists, writers, thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives.

Leading artists, writers, thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, solider Harry Parker turned author and has written a study of the way robotics, computing and AI might be about to irrevocably alter our understanding of what it means to be human. Scientist and Radio 4 presenter Adam Rutherford's new book traces ideas about the perfect body and eugenics from the Spartans and Plato to present day politics and the pandemic. In her new book, philosopher and professor Clare Chambers argues that the unmodified body is a key principle of equality. While defending the right of anyone to change their bodies, she traces the way that the social pressure to modify send a powerful message: you are not good enough. They join Matthew Sweet alongside New Generation Thinker and academic at UCL, Xine Yao

Hybrid Humans: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Man and Machine by Harry Parker is out now.

Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics by Adam Rutherford is out now. You can hear him discussing Genes, racism, ageing and evidence with guests including Daniel Levitin in a previous episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fpj2

Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body by Clare Chambers is out now.

Xine Yao is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio. You can find an essay about The Inscrutable Writing of Sui Sin Far on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v9gl and a discussion about Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s31z

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Project Fizzyo promotes better breathing in teenagers with cystic fibrosis by merging their daily physiotherapy exercise routine with a computer game. Emma Raywood, PHD student and Lead Investigator on Project Fizzyo explains how it works.

And vets are using a VR headset to help them oversee the health of cows in a project exploring the benefits of computer game technology for use in other working environments. Prof Ruth Falconer from Abertay University heads the SmARtview project. It’s a world away from 1972 when pong was developed by Allan Alcorn. New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding finds out more.

Project Fizzyo:

SmARtview project:

Today’s conversation was a New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research council which is part of UKRI.

Link to playlist New Research on the Free Thinking programme website on BBC Radio 3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Presenter: Christopher Harding

Pankaj Mishra's Run and Hide tells a story of modern Indian times, as the hidden pasts of wealthy, Gatsby-style tech entrepreneurs must be reckoned with.

And to help put this modern India in context, Dr Pragya Dhital will consider the resonances of the tumultuous period of "The Emergency", the response of the Indian government to a period of "internal disturbance" in the 1970s. She discusses the homemade or samizdat style leaflets which journalists like Ram Dutt Tripathi used to great effect.

The cuisine of India is a national symbol around the world, but Dr Sharanya Murali explores how this most traditional artform, cookery, can become iconoclastic when utilised in performance art by the likes of Pushpamala N and Raj Goody.

And Dr Vikram Visana will consider populism in India, telling us how differing parties are vying to answer questions of national identity which seem increasingly ill-suited to the challenges facing this modern democracy - and one of the key figures he discusses is KM Munshi.

Asked for their key cultural figures of India the panel made some eclectic choices. Seek out the short stories of Ismat Chughtai who endured an obscenity trial for her works, and VS Naipaul was viewed as a great chronicler of a crisis in the Hindu struggle with the modern world. Bilkis Dadi was the most recognisable face of the Shaheen Bagh protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the music of Mehdi Hassan was remembered as a culturally unifying force between India and Pakistan.

Read more at: https://www.shethepeople.tv/news/shaheen-baghs-bilkis-dadi-on-bbcs-100-women-of-2020-list/

Presented by Rana Mitter

Image: Pankaj Mishra, credit: Windham Campbell Prize

If you want more programmes exploring South Asian culture and history you can find Rana looking at the film Pather Panchali made by Satyajit Ray and the writing of Sunjeev Sahota https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060zmjs

Pankaj Mishra's Run and Hide tells a story of modern Indian times, as the hidden pasts of wealthy, Gatsby-style tech entrepreneurs must be reckoned with.

And to help put this modern India in context, Dr Pragya Dhital will consider the resonances of the tumultuous period of "The Emergency", the response of the Indian government to a period of "internal disturbance" in the 1970s. She discusses the homemade or samizdat style leaflets which journalists like Ram Dutt Tripathi used to great effect.

The cuisine of India is a national symbol around the world, but Dr Sharanya Murali explores how this most traditional artform, cookery, can become iconoclastic when utilised in performance art by the likes of Pushpamala N and Raj Goody.

And Dr Vikram Visana will consider populism in India, telling us how differing parties are vying to answer questions of national identity which seem increasingly ill-suited to the challenges facing this modern democracy - and one of the key figures he discusses is KM Munshi.

Asked for their key cultural figures of India the panel made some eclectic choices. Seek out the short stories of Ismat Chughtai who endured an obscenity trial for her works, and VS Naipaul was viewed as a great chronicler of a crisis in the Hindu struggle with the modern world. Bilkis Dadi was the most recognisable face of the Shaheen Bagh protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the music of Mehdi Hassan was remembered as a culturally unifying force between India and Pakistan.

Read more at: https://www.shethepeople.tv/news/shaheen-baghs-bilkis-dadi-on-bbcs-100-women-of-2020-list/

Presented by Rana Mitter

If you want more programmes exploring South Asian culture and history you can find Rana looking at the film Pather Panchali made by Satyajit Ray and the writing of Sunjeev Sahota https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060zmjs