Free Thinking

How green is office working? Have changes since Covid helped us plan for a more environmentally friendly way of working?

Philosopher Dr Alexander Douglas and Dr Jane Parry, who works on Work after Lockdown, talk to Des Fitzgerald about the future of work in a post-Covid-19 world and the implications for our environment.

Dr Alexander Douglas is a Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is a founder and co-director of the Future of Work and Income Research Network (funded by AHRC) at the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs.

Dr Jane Parry is a Lecturer and Director of Research for HRM and Organisational Behaviour within Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. She is the Principal Investigator on the project, Work after Lockdown, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (part of UKRI). You can read more about the project and contribute to their worker wellbeing survey at https://www.workafterlockdown.uk/participate.

Professor Des Fitzgerald is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Exeter.

You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.

The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2

For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: Responding to climate change – UKRI or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast.

Producer: Marcus Smith

Is encouraging action still art? What does it mean to make art about the environment? Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough brings together a curator, researchers and artists to discuss these questions. She hears about suggestions from artists, inspired by the forward thinking Gustav Metzger (1926 - 2017), collated by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. These include the idea from Futurefarmers that we "make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer's bookshelf" or Forensic Architecture's call for us to "Look at an air bubble" or Olafur Eliasson's "Look down, look up" and a poetic call to action inspired by the writer Audre Lorde (1934-1992): you can find an episode all about her work in the Free Thinking archives. Lucy Neal describes a project that has involved a forest camp in Coventry looking back at the ideas of the suffragettes. Wayne Binitie shares his experiences of taking photographs of melting ice sheets, recreating them in a gallery and making sound and music. Dr Jenna C. Ashton describes her work with communities in Manchester thinking about how they face up to changes in the climate and reflect those in a pageant planned for next year.

140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kostas Stasinopoulos is published now - and draws on the environmental programme Back to Earth run by the Serpentine Gallery where Obrist is an Artistic Director https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/

You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Dr Des Fitzgerald and Dr Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.

Producer: Sofie Vilcins

"Before there were books there were stories". Salman Rushdie's opening words in his collected Essays from 2003-2020. In one of them he reveals that Alice in Wonderland made such an impression on him as a child that he can still recite Jabberwocky. So Free Thinking brought him together with the literary historian Lucy Powell and with Mark Blacklock, who has studied literature about the fourth dimension, for a conversation about the power of dreams, the place of logic and irrationality and the truth of maths - inspired by the new exhibition about Alice in Wonderland on at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Matthew Sweet hosts the discussion.

Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from 22nd May 2021

Late Junction on BBC Radio 3 has been asking people to send in their dreams to the artist Sam Potter. He's created an AI programme dream machine which morphs these into texts which composers have then worked on. If you tune into Late Junction on Friday nights BBC Radio 3 11pm throughout June you can hear the dreamlike results https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tp52

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Should Kew re-label its plants? What do you see when you study a still life painting on the gallery walls? How do nineteenth century authors depict deadly plants? New Generation Thinker Christienna Fryar discusses new ways of understanding British history through horticulture with her four guests:

You might be interested in the Free Thinking discussion looking at Darwin's The Descent of Man https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s31z

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to share their research on the radio.

Image: The Temperate House at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence'. Thus ends the only book the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. But it's a book that's had people talking ever since it was published a century years ago. In an event hosted by the Austrian Cultural Forum, and in collaboration with the British Wittgenstein Society, Shahidha Bari discusses the contexts and contents of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at 100 with Wittgenstein's biographer Ray Monk, the philosophers Juliet Floyd and Dawn Wilson, and Wittgenstein's niece Monica Nadler Wittgenstein.

In the Preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein claims to have solved all the problems of philosophy. The youngest son of one of the wealthiest families in Europe, based in Vienna, Ludwig moved to England in 1908 to study the then cutting edge-topic of flight aerodynamics. From there he developed an interest in pure mathematics, which led him to philosophy, and to the revolutionary work of the logician Gottlob Frege. Frege recommended he went to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell, who quickly recognised him as "perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived".

The work that Wittgenstein began in Cambridge eventually led to the composition of the Tractatus, but not before the intervention of the First World War, during which he signed up to the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought in some of the fiercest battles on the Eastern Front, even volunteering for an observation post in no-man's-land. Finished whilst he was still in military service, the Tractatus combines an innovative account of the nature of logic with searching investigation of personhood and mysticism. Written in an aphoristic style that seems to conceal as much as it reveals, it is a major work of Viennese Modernism as well as a foundational text of analytical philosophy.

You can find a playlist of conversations about philosophy on the Free Thinking website which include

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Wearing denim, workwear, or sharp tailoring makes a statement about how we think of ourselves. Charlie Porter has been exploring the relationship between artists and clothes. He joins writer Olivia Laing and Ekow Eshun for a conversation about clothing, bodies, and our expression of our sexuality, hosted by Shahidha Bari.

Olivia Laing's latest book is called Everybody: A Book About Freedom

Charlie Porter has published What Artists Wear. A former Turner prize judge, he writes and curates and is a visiting Fashion lecturer at the University of Westminster.

British-Ghanaian photographer James Barnor's work is on show at the Serpentine Gallery in London from 19 May - 22 October 2021.

Ekow Eshun has curated An Infinity of Traces, which runs at the Lisson Gallery in London from 13 April – 5 June 2021, featuring UK-based established and emerging Black artists whose work explores notions of race, history, being, and belonging.

Jade Montserrat, one of the artists featured in Ekow's show, talked to Free Thinking in a programme about collage and Dada https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000k9ws

Producer: Emma Wallace

You can find more conversations in the Free Thinking archive and available to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts, including;

Olivia Laing on her novel inspired by Kathy Acker, and a discussion of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7mryz

Image Credit: Getty Images/Jonathan Knowles

The Startup Wife is the title of Tahmima Anam's latest novel. Anne McElvoy talks to her about writing about the work/life balance and ideas about risk. New Generation Thinker Mirela Ivanova, from the University of Oxford, is researching Balkan history. She writes us a postcard about the strangely changing look of the main museum in Sofia, Bulgaria and why it's significant. And we look back at Roman history as the British Museum opens an exhibition Nero: the man behind the myth, talking to curator, Dr Thorsten Opper and historian, Tom Holland.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Tahmima Anam is taking part in the Hay Festival. Her novel The Startup Wife is being read on BBC Radio 4 from June 6th at 22.45

Nero: the man behind the myth runs at the British Museum in London from May 27th 2021 to October 24th 2021.

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

You can find information about Hay Festival at hayfestival.com

Image: Tahmima Anam

Is Gogglebox the main place on TV where you now find criticism? What does that tell us about the role of the critic today? Suzi Feay, Arifa Akbar and Charlotte Mullins join Matthew Sweet to review a new art exhibition at the Barbican showcasing the art and ideas of Jean Dubuffet and to reflect on what being a critic means. Matthew pays tribute to the thinking of Kevin Jackson (3 January 1955 – 10 May 2021) who took part in many critical discussions on BBC Radio 3. New Generation Thinker Vid Simoniti teaches philosophy and art at Liverpool University and he's written us a postcard reflecting on what it means when algorithms dictate the culture we consume.

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty runs at the Barbican, London from May 17th 2021 to August 22nd 2021. Dubuffet (1901-1985) collected artwork made by people outside the arts establishment and in his own work he incorporated butterfly wings, sand, lava, collages of cut up paintings and graffiti. Talking about the portraits he made he said, ‘Funny noses, big mouths, crooked teeth, hairy ears, I’m not against all that’.

You can find a playlist focusing on the Visual Arts on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl

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

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

A ghostly Franco visits an elderly man in the latest novel by Patrick McGrath. He joins historian Duncan Wheeler and the makers of a prize winning documentary Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, as Rana Mitter's guests for a discussion of the Spanish Civil War, the ghosts and silences that remain and how history is now being written.

The Silence of Others, backed by Pedro Almodóvar and directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar has been screened at festivals across the world and has picked up many prizes. https://thesilenceofothers.com/

Duncan Wheeler is Chair of Spanish Studies at the University of Leeds and has published Following Franco: Spanish Culture and Politics in Transition.

Patrick McGrath is the author of novels including Spider which was filmed by David Cronenburg, Asylum which was adapted by Patrick Marber and short stories collected under the title Writing Madness. His new novel depicting Francis McNulty, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, has the title Last Days in Cleaver Square.

Producer: Ruth Watts

On the Free Thinking website you can find past episodes with Rana Mitter discussing history and Pakistan, War in fact and fiction from World War I to African conflicts; What does a black history curriculum look like? and Deep Time and Human History. All episodes are available to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts.

Image: Valley of the Fallen from above which shows the Benedictine Abbey, near Madrid, Spain

Toussaint Louverture's revolutionary leadership in Haiti; Ravenna's place as a hub of culture and a meeting point of East and West; how motherhood and work have changed from Victorian Manchester factories to the modern boardroom; a 3,000 year history of attacks on libraries and book burnings; battles in the Atlantic from the Vikings to conflicts over slavery in the Caribbean and on the North American coast; recovering the voices of children who experienced the Holocaust: Rana Mitter looks at how the six authors shortlisted for the UK's most prestigious history prize have tackled these topics.

The books shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2021 are:

Survivors: Children’s Lives after the Holocaust by Rebecca Clifford

The winner will be announced on Wednesday 9 June 2021 in a virtual ceremony. The winner will be awarded £40,000 and each of the shortlisted authors receives £4,000.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

In the Free Thinking archives you can find interviews with the authors shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in previous years and a host of discussions about history looking at topics including Napoleon, John Henry Newman, Adnam Menderes and Turkish history, Northern Ireland, what we can learn from the upheavals of industrial revolution and empires ending, war in fact and fiction, Churchill, family ties and reshaping history with guests including Margaret McMillan, Tom Holland, Jared Diamond, Priya Atwal, Camilla Townsend, Ruth Scurr, Roy Foster and David Reynolds amongst others.