Free Thinking

What are the best shelters? the right language? how does our view of hosting families change if we look at refugee self help schemes and experiences in camps in Palestine and Syria ? A trio of researchers share their findings with John Gallagher as we mark Refugee Week 2020.

Dr Rebecca Tipton, from the University of Manchester, works on Translating Asylum - an ongoing research project looking at language and communication challenges common to individuals displaced by conflict both past and present https://translatingasylum.com/about/

Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, from University College London, leads Refugee Hosts - an ongoing research project examining local community experiences of and responses to displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. https://refugeehosts.org/

Associate Professor, Tom Scott-Smith, at the University of Oxford, is a 2020 New Generation Thinker and works on Architectures of Displacement - an ongoing research project exploring temporary accommodation for refugees in the Middle East and Europe. It is a partnership between the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University and the Pitt Rivers Museum. https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/research/architectures-of-displacement

All of their work features in the Imperial War Museum London exhibition Refugees: Forced to Flee. You can find more on the website https://www.iwm.org.uk/

Producer: Karl Bos

Can our theatrical landscape survive financially, and how might it need to creatively adapt to survive post pandemic? As part of the Lockdown Theatre Festival, Anne McElvoy's panel features:

Production: Jack Howson and Robyn Read

Lockdown Theatre will feature four plays that had their runs cut short: The Mikvah Project by Josh Azouz and originally showing at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, Love Love Love by Mike Bartlett recently revived for Lyric, Hammersmith Theatre, Rockets And Blue Lights by Winsome Pinnock - sadly suspended before its world premiere planned at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, and Shoe Lady by E.V. Crowe - cut short into its run at the Royal Court Theatre - Produced by Jeremy Mortimer, a Reduced Listening production for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and available on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08fw06m

In the Free Thinking archives you can find discussions including

How do you cope with a sense of failure? Michèle Roberts has been Booker shortlisted and has 12 novels under her belt but her latest book is a clear eyed account of a year spent rewriting after having a novel rejected. What sustained her in part were her female friends and cooking. Lara Feigel is the author of acclaimed non fiction books and her first novel takes the template of Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel about female friendship and examines the lives of women now set against the backdrop of the publishing world. Alexandra Reza has been thinking about the place of the kitchen in novels such as Maryse Condé’s Morsels and Marvels, Marie N’Diaye’s The Cheffe, Calixthe Beyala’s How to cook your husband the African way, and Sarah Maldoror’s Pudding for Constance. Shahidha Bari presents.

Michèle Roberts's latest book is called Negative Capability. You can find her talking to Free Thinking about smell and her novel The Walworth Beauty https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08n24f5

Lara Feigel's novel is called The Group. You can hear her in Free Thinking discussions about Doris Lessing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tml77 and a debate about Fiction of 1946 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wrq03

Alexandra Reza is a 2020 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Robyn Read

Mathew Sweet with Linda Grant, Laurence Scott & Lucy Whitehead. Dickens died on June 9th 1870. In 1948, the critic FR Leavis published the Great Tradition and included only one Dickens novel but that same year saw the film of Oliver Twist by David Lean. Our panel have been re-reading novels including Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations, looking at a form of Dickens fan fiction following his death, the changes in literary fashion and the way his work connects with the present day.

Linda Grant is the author of books including A Stranger City, The Dark Circle and When I Lived in Modern Times.

You might be interested in this conversation about Our Mutual Friend in which Philip Dodd talks with Iain Sinclair, Sandy Welch, Rosemary Ashton & Jerry White https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0180f5k

Producer: Robyn Read

Naomi Paxton looks at the impact of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, talking to researchers Katarina Schwarz and Alicia Kidd who are trying to measure and improve its effectiveness.

Katarina Schwarz from the Rights Lab at Nottingham University works with the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull on a project looking into what makes people from particular countries vulnerable to being trafficked and exploited, including in the UK.

Over the past five years, over 75% of people identified as potential victims of modern slavery in the UK represent only ten nationalities. The top 20 nationalities make up over 90% of referrals to the authorities. Rights Lab and Wilberforce Institute are working on research that interrogates the legal, policy, economic and social situation in these top 20 countries.

The Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull, together with partners, is working on a project to develop a package of workshops targeted at front line practitioners, businesses, recruitment agencies and NGOs in local areas across the UK. Rather than relying on often dry and theoretical traditional workshops raising awareness on forms of modern slavery, the workshops will be based on real life situations. Alicia Kidd is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute working on this training project.

These projects are part of the work done through the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre.

Producer: Robyn Read

Robin Askwith experienced isolation as a child with polio. In a conversation with Matthew Sweet, he reflects on a career running from the Confessions sex comedies to arthouse cinema working with directors including Lindsay Anderson and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His first film role was playing the schoolboy, Keating, in the film if.... and his most recent TV role has seen him appear on Coronation Street.

Producer: Robyn Read

Actor Richard Wilson, Professor Naoko Shimazu and film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh join Rana Mitter to look at this cinematic classic which was one of the 53 films made by Yasujiro Ozu before his death in 1963. Tokyo Story follows an elderly couple who go to visit their busy grown up children and their widowed daughter-in-law.

You can find more on their website www.bfi.org.uk/japan

And if you want more discussions about significant cultural landmarks from The Tin Drum, This Sporting Life and 2001 to novels by Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and George Orwell we have a playlist of landmarks too https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44

Producer: Laura Thomas

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written about Auden, Dostoevsky and tragedy. At Hay Festival he talks to poet Simon Armitage about the imprint of landscapes in Yorkshire, West Wales, and the Middle East, the use of dialect words and reinterpreting myths. Chaired by Rana Mitter.

Books by Rowan Williams include Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction and The Tragic Imagination. He is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

A playlist featuring other conversations and in depth interviews with writers is available on the Free Thinking website with episodes free to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8 and you can find more programmes from this year's online Hay Festival https://www.hayfestival.com/home

Producer: Fiona McLean

Matthew Sweet talks to author Sarah Perry about her gothic imagination, writing about religion, rationalism and disease in novels including The Essex Serpent, After Me Comes The Flood and Melmoth. Recorded from her home in Norwich, Sarah discusses her experience of these times as someone who has an auto-immune condition, her interest in comets and the way she used sewing to overcome a temporary inability to write.

You can hear more from authors in the Norfolk area on the website of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival https://nnfestival.org.uk/

There is a collection of in depth interviews with guests including Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Sebastian Faulks, Marilynne Robinson and other authors on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8

Sarah Perry can be found discussing her novel Melmoth in detail in this episode of Free Thinking called Sarah Perry, Spookiness and Fear https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000kk2

Producer: Robyn Read

Jay Griffiths, Vincent Deary, Louise Robinson and Matthew Smith discuss our mental health.

How does depression affect our sense of time and the rhythms of daily life? Our body clocks have long been seen by scientists as integral to our physical and mental health - but what happens when mental illness disrupts or even stops that clock? Presenter Anne McElvoy is joined by those who have suffered depression and those who treat it - and they attempt to offer some solutions.

Jay Griffiths is the author of Tristimania: a Diary of Manic Depression and a book Pip Pip which explores attitudes to time across the world.

Doctor Vincent Deary teaches at Northumbria University, works as a clinician in the UK's first trans-diagnostic Fatigue Clinic and is the author of a trilogy about How To Live - the first of which is called How We Are.

Professor Louise Robinson is Director of Newcastle University's Institute for Ageing and Professor of Primary Care and Ageing.

Professor Matthew Smith is a New Generation Thinker from 2012 who teaches at Strathclyde University at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare.

This programme was recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead in 2017 and is being broadcast now as part of the BBC's contribution to Mental Health Awareness week.

You might be intereseted in Sleep;Freedom to Think from the Festival Lecturer Professor Russell Foster https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hz9yw

Producer: Zahid Warley.