Free Thinking

Everyday lives from the past are often hard to reconstruct. As we prepare for the Census 2021, what stories can we tell from past censuses and the records held at Kew at the National Archives? John Gallagher is joined by four researchers whose work sheds light on women entrepreneurs, the health of residents in Brighton and Hastings, and the story of a house in a suburb of York - Tang Hall.

Dr Carrie Van Lieshout from the Open University is working on a project called A Century of Migrant Businesswomen comparing census figures from 1911 to 2011.

Audrey Collins is Records Specialist in Family History at the National Archives and the author of guides to tracing family history.

Professor Krista Cowman at the University of Lincoln is researching women’s lives in a number of different contexts: as ‘war brides’ in France during World War One, as campaigners for post-war reconstruction in and out of Parliament in Britain, and in a number of community campaigns for safe play areas in the inter-and post-war period. She has worked on the history of a house in York's Tang Hall.

This episode was made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI.

You can find more conversations about New Research in a playlist on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Producer: Emma Wallace

Edogawa Rampo's stories give us a Japanese version of Sherlock Holmes. New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding traces the way detective fiction chimed with the modernising of Japan, when the ability to reason and think problems through logically was celebrated, when cities were changing and other arts mourned a lost rural idyll. In The Black Lizard, the hero Akechi Kogorō plays a cat and mouse game with a female criminal who has kidnapped a businessman's daughter.

Christopher Harding is the author of The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives and Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 - the Present (published in the US as A History of Modern Japan: In Search of a Nation, 1850 – the Present). He teaches at the University of Edinburgh.

You can find him discussing other aspects of Japanese history in the playlist Free Thinking explores Japanese culture https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0657spq

Producer: Ruth Watts

Orientalism was his book, published in 1978, which outlined Said's view that imperialism and a romanticised version of Arab Culture clouded the way the East was depicted by Western scholars. In 1981 he published Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (revised in 1997). Timothy Brennan puts these books and other initiatives, such as the founding of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim; and his advocacy for the establishment of a Palestinian state, into context in the first biography since Said's death from leukemia in 2003. Rana Mitter talks to Timothy Brennan and the writers Ahdaf Soueif, Pankaj Mishra and Marina Warner about Said's life and legacy. Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said by Timothy Brennan is out now.

Dame Marina Warner - author of many books about figures including Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary and fairy tales including the Arabian Nights. She has just published Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir which pieces together of her parents' lives from journals, photos and mementoes and looks at her own childhood in 1950s Cairo.

Ahdaf Soueif is an Egyptian novelist and author of books including In the Eye of the Sun, The Map of Love, Cairo: My City our Revolution; and she founded the Palestine Festival of Literature.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of books including Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond; A History of Indian Literature in English; Age of Anger: A History of the Present and Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire. You can find him discussing Global Anger with Elif Shafak in the Free Thinking archives https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08c32c3

You can find other programmes exploring key books and ideas in a playlist called Landmarks of Culture on the Free Thinking website. Recent episodes include Foucault, John Rawls and Hegel https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44 They are all available to download as Arts&Ideas podcasts.

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its follow-up takes the lead character to Parisian salons and an underworld of drug dealing so Free Thinking tracks the French connection through film, history and philosophy as Matthew Sweet is joined by Viet Thanh Nguyen, by film critic Phuong Le and by Peter Salmon - author of a biography of Derrida - he's been investigating the ideas of the Vietnamese thinker Tran Duc Thao who inspired some of Derrida's work.

The Sympathizer and the new novel The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen are out now.

Producer: Harry Parker

Mars is the focus of current space exploration but how far back does this interest go? Dr Joshua Nall tells Seb Falk about the Mars globe held at the Whipple Science Museum in Cambridge. Hannah Smithson explains her research into the way we see colour and explains the different perceptions of that blue/black/gold/white dress. Timothy Peacock has been studying the fears about Skylab falling to earth, looking at government files and the media reporting of the 1979 re-entry and distintegration of the first United States space station.

Dr Joshua Nall is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the Curator of Modern Sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge. His book News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860–1910 was awarded the Philip Pauly Prize by the History of Science society.

Seb Falk is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council to put research on the radio. He is the author of the book The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. You can hear more from him in a Free Thinking episode called Ancient Wisdom and Remote Living https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q3by and his short feature for BBC Radio 3 about why we shouldn't compare Covid to the Black Death https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nkzr

You can find a playlist exploring New Research on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

This episode was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

From prejudice against accents to early attempts to create an artificial voice - Matthew Sweet is joined by the academics Sadie Ryan, Allison Koenecke and Lynda Clark.

Sadie Ryan hosts a podcast Accentricity and is part of the Manchester Voices project team https://www.manchestervoices.org/project-team/

Lynda Clark is part of the InGAME (Innovation in Games and Media Enterprise) project at the University of Dundee. She's interested in interactive fiction and AI storytelling. She's been researching the experiments of Joseph Faber who created Euphonia in 1846 and created her own take working with games and digital experiences.

Allison Koenecke works in the Stanford University Computational Policy Lab and the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab

You might also be interested in these programmes from the Free Thinking archives - all available to download as BBC Arts & Ideas podcasts

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Paranoia, the collateral damage on his family and the investigations he makes into drugs used to treat such a breakdown: Horatio Clare talks to Laurence Scott about his Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing. Plus the poetry of Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971). Author of the much quoted lines Not Waving but Drowning; Stevie Smith suffered from depression and acute shyness. New Generation Thinker Noreen Masud looks at her writing.

Horatio Clare has recorded a series of different walks for BBC Radio 3. His books include The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal; A Single Swallow; Down the Sea in Ships and his new memoir Heavy Light.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The films Cuties and Rocks present a contemporary image of girlhood. What do they tell us about what it is to be a girl and to negotiate growing up? We hear from three researchers who look at: the influence of such films made by female directors; the role of aunties in giving advice about health and the body; and the portrayal of female friendship in boarding school novels by authors like Enid Blyton. Shahidha Bari is joined by Chisomo Kalinga, Tiffany Watt Smith, and Elspeth Mitchell.

Chisomo Kalinga is researching the way storytelling informs concepts of health and wellbeing in Malawi, and has written about fictional portrayals and the idea of stereotypes. She is a Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

Elspeth Mitchell's Phd looked at ‘the girl’ and the moving image in work by Simone de Beauvoir, Chantal Akerman, and Eija-Liisa Ahtila. She is now researching feminine identities, costume and burlesque at the University of Leeds.

Tiffany Watt Smith is the author of books including The Book of Human Emotions, and Schadenfreude, and she is now researching women and friendship. She is Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University London and is a New Generation Thinker - the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), turning research into radio.

You can find a range of programming for International Women's Day on 8 March on BBC Radio 3, including a Words and Music playlist of readings and music exploring the idea of Women Walking Alone, and a series of broadcasts featuring the work of women composers - part of an ongoing project BBC Radio 3 is running with the AHRC to record more music written by women past and present.

In the Free Thinking archives there is a playlist which includes discussions about women in academia, the woman writer and reader, discrimination and British justice, women and war, and women’s bodies, and hearing from guests including Helena Kennedy, Layla AlAmmar, Kiley Reid, Helen Lewis, and Maaza Mengiste. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwp

This episode was made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI. You can find more about New Research in a playlist on the Free Thinking programme website - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90 - where you’ll find other episodes in the New Thinking strand, showcasing academic research.

Producer: Emma Wallace

Catherine Pepinster, Kate Kennedy, Tim Stanley and New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel join Rana Mitter to look at the poet, theologian and now Saint John Henry. The programme marks 175 years since Newman's conversion from the high church tradition of Anglicanism and the Oxford Movement to the Catholic faith on 23 Feb 1846, with a conversation exploring his thinking and poetic writing.

Catherine Pepinster is former editor of the Tablet and the author of The Keys and the Kingdom: The British and the Papacy

You can find a playlist Free Thinking explores religious belief https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mwxlp including contributions from Ziauddin Sardar, Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong, Rabbi Sacks, Marilynne Robinson and Simon Schama.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Shahidha Bari is joined by Lisa Downing, Stuart Elden, and Stephen Shapiro to read volume 4 of Foucault's History of Sexuality, translated into English for the first time, which examines beliefs and practices among the early Christians in Medieval Europe. Although he had specified in his will that his works shouldn't be published after he died (in 1984), the rights holders of Foucault decided that these ideas could now be made public. So what do they tell us and how influential has his approach to sexuality been?

Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham. She writes about gender and sexuality and she’s the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault and editor of After Foucault.

Stuart Elden's books include The Early Foucault, which will be published in June 2021. This continues the work in his earlier books Foucault’s Last Decade and Foucault: The Birth of Power. He is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick.

And Stephen Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature also at the University of Warwick. He is co-author of how to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

You can find other episodes on philosophical themes in a Free Thinking playlist https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx