Free Thinking

From Berlin techno music to the Glasgow ‘rag trade’, divisive dams to fake news - hear the research topics of 10 early career academics introduced by New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough at the Free Thinking Festival

New Generation Thinkers is an annual scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 researchers to work on ideas for radio

Dr Jeff Howard - University College London - is investigating how to respond to ‘dangerous speech’, lies and ‘fake news’

Dr Emily Cock - Cardiff University - is exploring changing attitudes towards facial disfigurement, from C17 to now

Dr Ella Parry- Davies -British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama - is researching the home lives of migrant communities of Philippine women in London and Beirut

Dr Brendan McGeever - Lecturer in the Sociology of Racialization and Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London - researches the forgotten Russian pogroms of 1919

Dr Tom Smith - Lecturer in German, University of St Andrews - is exploring the emotional experience of techno music in Berlin and beyond

Dr Dina Rezk - Associate Professor in Middle Eastern History, University of Reading - has looked at how Dr Bassem Youssef, ‘Egypt’s Jon Stewart’ shot to fame

Christine Faraday - University of Cambridge - who is looking into the history of the power of human sight

Dr Jade Halbert - University of Huddersfield - rediscovers the post-war ‘rag trade’ in British fashion

Dr Majed Akhter - King's College London - is examining the contentious history of dams built in the 20th century

Susan Greaney - Cardiff University - is unearthing Neolithic humans attitudes to the ground beneath them and the underworld

Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

We talk about “human emotion” as if all people, everywhere, feel the same. But three thinkers with an international perspective discuss how the expression and interpretation of emotions differs around the world. China specialist and Radio 3 presenter Rana Mitter hosts this Free Thinking Festival discussion.

Aatish Taseer is a writer and journalist who was born in London, grew up in New Delhi and now lives in Manhattan. His first novel, The Temple-Goers was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. His latest book is The Twice Born: Life and death on the Ganges. Among other publications he has written for Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.

Thomas Dixon was the first director of Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions, the first of its kind in the UK. He is currently researching anger and has explored the histories of friendship, tears, and the British stiff upper lip in books Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears and The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. You can hear his Free Thinking Festival Lecture here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0756nqp

Veronica Strang is an environmental anthropologist at Durham University who has researched with indigenous communities in Australia for many years. Her book Uncommon Ground: Landscape, Values and the Environment is about understanding people’s emotional and imaginative attachments to places. She recently assisted the United Nations with research exploring cultural and spiritual values in relation to water.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Two animal psychologists and a historian of animal studies join Eleanor Rosamund Barraclought to discuss whether it's possible to recognise similar traits in humans, chimps, crows, hawks, dogs and cats in terms of affinity and attachment, despite different evolutionary paths. How do we know when a chimp wants to play? How does one crow decide what to feed its mate? The Free Thinking Festival explores the emotional similarities and differences between humans & animals.

Nicky Clayton is a scientist and a dancer who began as a zoologist and moved into psychology. She is Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is also Scientist in Residence at dance company Rambert and co-founder of The Captured Thought blog and project. Her expertise is in studying members of the crow family, who have huge brains for their body size, and in studying thinking with and without words.

Kim Bard is a Professor at the University of Portsmouth. She has studied the development of emotions, cognition, communication, and attachment in captive young chimpanzees for over 30 years. Her research concerns understanding the process of development in evolution and contributes to captive animal welfare.

Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies and Director of the British Animal Studies Network at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She has written widely on modern and historical human-animal relationships and has recently finished a study of people's lives with their livestock animals in early modern England titled Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Charles Dickens. Walt Disney. The Romantic poets..These renowned artists and entertainers were all accused of being “over-sentimental”. But is our own age topping them all – with its culture of grief memoirs, gushing obituaries and feel-good fiction? Three Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature join Rana Mitter at the Free Thinking Festival to take a hard look at whether contemporary culture has “gone soft”.

Lisa Appignanesi is the author of books including Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love; Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors; All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion and Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness. She is Chair of the Royal Society of Literature Council.

Irenosen Okojie is author of a novel Butterfly Fish and a short story collection Speak Gigantular - surreal tales of love and loneliness. She has written for The New York Times, The Observer, and The Huffington Post and is currently running a writing workshop at London’s South Bank.

Rachel Hewitt’s books include A Revolution of Feeling:The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind and Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, where she is also Deputy Director of the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Poet and critic Bridget Minamore, TV drama expert John Yorke and film expert Melanie Williams join Matthew Sweet for a Brief Encounter at the Free Thinking Festival to look at the devices – music, close ups and the cliffhangers that cinema and TV employ to make us cry. From Bambi to Titanic, how have directors managed to trigger our tear ducts? And has the big screen actually shaped our understanding of emotion in modern life.

John Yorke is the author of How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them. Former Head of Channel Four Drama, Controller of BBC Drama Production and MD of Company Pictures, John has shaped stories and big emotional moments in British TV working on series such as Shameless and Life On Mars, EastEnders and Holby City, Bodies and Wolf Hall.

Melanie Williams is the author of Female Stars of British Cinema, a book about David Lean and British Women’s Cinema. She teaches at the University of East Anglia.

Bridget Minamore has published a poetry pamphlet about modern love and loss Titanic, her journalism includes writing for The Guardian and The Stage. She has written with organisations including The Royal Opera House, The National Theatre and Tate Modern.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Pascale Petit’s collection of poetry, Mama Amazonica, which explores motherhood, illness and pain through the foliage and creatures of the Amazon rainforest, won the 2018 Prize.

2019 Ondaatje Prize shortlist as announced during the recording of this programme.

Rania Abouzeid No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (Oneworld)

Aida Edemariam The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History (4th Estate)

Aminatta Forna Happiness (Bloomsbury)

Sarah Moss Ghost Wall (Granta)

Guy Stagg The Crossway (Picador)

Adam Weymouth Kings of the Yukon: A River Journey (Particular Books)

The winner of this annual award of £10,000 for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place will be announced on May 13th 2019.

Anne McElvoy debates at the Free Thinking Festival with intensive care doctor Aoife Abbey, GP & Prof Louise Robinson, Naeem Soomro expert in using robotic surgery and Michael Brown medical historian. Does emotion have any place in relationships with patients in a more open age? Medical professionals are trained to adopt “clinical distance” when dealing with patients. Tradition says that getting emotional weakens their judgement of medical evidence and can cause safeguarding issues. But how can those in caring roles prevent disinterest seeming like un-interest?

Aoife Abbey is a doctor working in Intensive Care whose book Seven Signs of Life is an account of her experiences told through the emotions she encounters on a daily basis. Aoife previously wrote a blog as The Secret Doctor for the British Medical Association and works on a national training programme for doctors in intensive care medicine. She is a council member of the Intensive Care Society (UK).

Michael Brown is a cultural historian at the University of Roehampton who is currently leading a project for the Wellcome Trust entitled Surgery & Emotion exploring this relationship from 1800 to the present. He is the author of Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c. 1760-1850

Louise Robinson is Director of Newcastle University’s Institute for Ageing, Professor of Primary Care and Ageing and a GP. She leads one of only three Alzheimer Society national Centres of Excellence on Dementia Care and is a member of the national dementia care guidelines development group.

Dr Naeem Soomro is Leading Consultant Urologist at Freeman Hospital, Newcastle. He has pioneered minimally invasive and robotic surgery in the North East and has developed the biggest multi-speciality robotic surgery program in the UK.

Producer: Fiona McLean

You don't have to be religious to believe that, as the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "all human beings have the right to be free and treated equally." However, drawing on a wide range of examples including Shakespeare's Richard III to Disney's Jiminy Cricket, New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel argues that the UN's emphasis on "reason and conscience" as the drivers of liberty and equality make the modern conception of human rights more religious, and less liberal, than both secular proponents and conservative critics have supposed.

Dafydd Mills Daniel is the McDonald Departmental Lecturer in Christian Ethics and Theology at Jesus College, University of Oxford. He is researching Newton and alchemy

The Essay was recorded at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Michael Talbot asks how can power be exerted over water? What do borders mean in the featureless desert of the ocean? These were questions faced by the Ottoman Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries when an imaginary line was used to create a legally enforced border at sea for the Sultans in Istanbul who called themselves “rulers of the two seas”, the Black and the Mediterranean.

Sarah Moss is a novelist and Professor at the University of Warwick. Her most recent book Ghost Wall articulates the tangled space of love, abuse and resistance. Her previous novels include Cold Earth, Night Waking, Signs for Lost Children and The Tidal Zone. She has written for The Guardian, New Statesman, The Independent and BBC Radio.

Michael Richardson is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Newcastle University. He has longstanding research interests in masculinities and intergenerational relationships on post-industrial Tyneside. He is a trustee of North East Young Dads and Lads project and works closely with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books.

Harriet Shawcross is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. Her first book Unspeakable reflects on how, as a teenager, she stopped speaking at school for almost a year, communicating only when absolutely necessary. It mixes personal experience with travel diaries and interviews including Eve Ensler creator of The Vagina Monologues.

Una is a comics artist and writer. Her first graphic novel Becoming Unbecoming is about Una’s own encounters with sexual violence and survival. Her other titles include On Sanity: One Day In Two Lives and Cree, commissioned by New Writing North and Durham Book Festival.

Producer: Luke Mulhall