Free Thinking

Where are we? How did we get here, and where are we going?

Our relationship with the self-propelled small metal boxes in which we spend so much of our time is not as simple as it feels.

Why did we learn to need them? How did they shape our cities, our typewriters and our bacon slicers? Should we now redesign our roads, streets and even our skies for AI driven cars? What do we learn by looking at suburban car parks?

Brendan Cormier is curator of the forthcoming exhibition Cars: Accelerating the Modern World, which opens in November. Nicole Badstuber of the University of Westminster studies our commuting habit and the trends in journeying that modern life inflicts on all of us. Jack Stilgoe is a senior lecturer at UCL who studies governance and oversight of emerging technologies, looking in particular at driverless futures. Gareth E Rees is author of Car Park Life, a journal of empty spaces and discarded moment, described as "A Retail Park Heart of Darkness".

M1 Symphony, a soundscape documentary telling the story of Britain’s first motorway, featuring a specially-commissioned composition from former BBC Proms Inspire composer Alex Woolf, performed by the BBC Philharmonic is available to hear if you search for BBC Radio 3's Sunday Feature.

On BBC.com/Ideas you can find a short film exploring the history of motorway service stations

Producer: Alex Mansfield.

Ali Smith, Jay Bernard and James Graham join Matthew Sweet at the British Library in a discussion organised with the Royal Society of Literature.

Making art from real events is as old to writing as the pen – older. But what happens when the events you are writing about are recent, or happening as you write? What are the writer’s duties to fact? How can writing bear witness to contemporary moments of social upheaval or human disasters? In writing the ‘now’, where does non-fiction stop and fictive creation begin? In this discussion, three writers, across forms, consider how to write real events.

Ali Smith has published three novels in a four-novel seasonal cycle, Autumn, Winter and Spring, exploring time, society and art in the context of Brexit Britain.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Rachel Reeves MP, Hull academic Jane Thomas and New Generation Thinker Katie Cooper discuss the novel South Riding and the writing and politics of Winifred Holtby with Matthew Sweet and an audience in Hull at the Contains Strong Language Festival. With readings by Rachel Dale.

Winifred Holtby (23 June 1898 – 29 September 1935) came from a farming family in Yorkshire, met Vera Brittain at Oxford University and shared a house in London as they began their careers as writers. Brittain went on to publish Testament of Youth. Holtby made her name with journalism for newspapers including the Manchester Guardian and the feminist magazine Time and Tide and published 14 books including the first critical study of Virginia Woolf. When her doctor gave her only two more years to live, she devoted herself to writing her novel South Riding which was published the year after she died aged 37.

Rachel Reeves is Labour MP for Leeds and the author of books including Women of Westminster: The MPs Who Changed Politics

Contains Strong Language is the BBC's national poetry and spoken word festival which took place in Hull for the first time 3 years ago as part of the City of Culture celebrations.

Producer Fiona McLean

Rana Mitter and guests look at the history of atheism and morality. Alec Ryrie's new book 'Unbelievers: an emotional history of doubt' argues that the rationality arguments for non-belief developed after congregations began to doubt the church. The Barber Institute in Birmingham begins a new exhibition into one of the more enigmatic sacred artists of c15 Antwerp, Jan de Beer. Sarah Wise has contributed a chapter on Morality to a new imprint of Charles' Booth's notorious London Poverty Maps. Jenny Kilbride lived and worked in the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in Ditchling, Sussex where her father had moved as a weaver to work in an Arts and Crafts community in the 1920s. A new Exhibition in the Ditchling Art and Craft Museum explores the legacy of the group - their faith, social creed, and wares.

Charles Booth's Poverty Maps have been republished and a project at LSE allows you to search them https://booth.lse.ac.uk/

You can find a collection of programmes Free Thinking on religious belief on the programme website. All are available as Arts & Ideas downloads https://bbc.in/2N2g3fk

Producer: Alex Mansfield.

Should we really be celebrating the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Cortés and European settlers in Mexico? Is this a "first encounter" - and how do you decipher history when there isn't anything written down? Claudia Rogers compares notes with Nandini Das. Nandini has been re-reading the accounts written by John Rolfe of his marriage to Pocahontas and looking at what we gain when we flip the narrative and see from the point of view of indigenous people. Hosted by New Generation Thinker John Gallagher from the University of Leeds.

Professor Nandini Das is Project Director for Tide: http://www.tideproject.uk/

This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

How welcome are selfies in modern art galleries and museums? What kind of labelling should be on display and should more objects be repatriated?

Laurence des Cars became Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2014. From 2007 to 2014, she was the French operator responsible for the development of the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Philip Tinari is Director and CEO of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. During his tenure, UCCA has mounted more than seventy exhibitions. From 2009 to 2012 he founded and edited LEAP, the first internationally distributed, bilingual magazine of contemporary art in China

Kennie Ting is the Director of the Asian Civilisations Museum and the Peranakan Museum, and concurrently Group Director, Museums at the National Heritage Board (NHB) Singapore. He has changed the focus from a geographical to a thematic, cross-cultural way of looking at art. He is the author of The Romance of the Grand Tour – 100 Years of Travel in South East Asia and Singapore 1819 – A Living Legacy.

You can hear Michael Govan, Sabine Haag and Hartwig Fischer in The Frieze Debate: Museums in the 21st Century https://bbc.in/2O5LF6V and this year's in depth conversation with Michael Govan is also available as a BBC Arts&Ideas podcast https://bbc.in/2mST8tn and in the visual arts playlist on the Free Thinking website.

Matthew Sweet on Chaplin's 1941 film and rising populism today with guests including Francesca Santoro L'hoir who acted alongside Chaplin as a child plus Ece Temelkuran, Peter Pomerantsev and Frank Dikotter.

Dutch Historian Frank Dikotter, who teaches in China, has published books on The Cultural Revolution, Mao's Famine and most recently How to Be a Dictator: the Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century which looks at Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Ceausescu, “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Kim Il Sung and Mengistu Haile Mariam

The Turkish journalist, novelist and poet Ece Temelkuran is the author of How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship

Peter Pomerantsev's books include Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

From Sean the Sheep & Damien Hirst to a knitted bikini. Shahidha Bari with a woolly episode talks to writer and knitter Esther Rutter, shepherd Axel Linden, medievalist John Lee and cultural historian Alexandra Harris.

Esther Rutter is the author of This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History.

Producer: Paula McGinley

Anne McElvoy talks prehistory with archaeologist Mike Pitts and artist Renee So plus critic Alex Clark gives her take on this year's Booker Prize winners - Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, and director Tinuke Craig discusses putting Gorky on stage in a new version written by Mike Bartlett.

Ancient and Modern by Renee So is at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill until 12th January

You can hear Booker prize winner Bernadine Evaristo talking about her depiction of 12 characters aged 12 to 93 in Girl, Woman, Other on the Free Thinking we broadcast back in May when the novel was published https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004s6n . You can find it in the Free Thinking Prose and Poetry playlist on the programme website.

Also in the New Thinking archive, which focuses on new research from UK universities, an episode called Neolithic Revelations: A lack of Neolithic dental floss proves to be a boon for archaeologists. Penny Bickle and Jim Leary share some surprising findings.

As the British Museum opens an exhibition on orientalism Inspired by the East, Matthew Sweet's guests include Ziauddin Sardar, editor of Critical Muslim, artist Inci Eviner, and historian Tom Holland, whose new book explores the Making of the Western Mind. Plus cultural critic Fatima Bhutto argues that the days of US inspired culture dominating the world are over and art forms from the global south such as Bollywood films, K-Pop and Turkish telenovelas are taking over.

Fatima Bhutto's book is called New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop

Critical Muslim is a quarterly publication of ideas and issues showcasing thinking on Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in a changing, interconnected world.

Tom Holland's books include Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West; Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom and latest Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (U.S. edition subtitled 'How the Christian Revolution Remade the World')

Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art runs at the British Museum in London from 10 October 2019 – 26 January 2020 and features contemporary art work by Inci Eviner.