Arts & Ideas Folgen

How Manc are the Gallaghers? John Gallagher hears about the results of a project to map accents in the city talking to Prof Rob Drummond. In Northumbria Dr Robert McKenzie has discovered that a Northern accent can cost you marks at school and job opportunities. However you speak, your accent reveals something about you. Dr John Gallagher talks to two researchers whose projects explore the variation in accents across England, and the way those accents shape our place in society. Rob Drummond is Reader in Sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. With the help of an Accent Van and archive recordings, his project Manchester Voices maps the accents of Greater Manchester, documenting people’s relationships with their own accent and charting how accents have changed over time, from lost rhotic Rs to the made-up Manchester accent of the Gallagher brothers. https://www.manchestervoices.org/ You can find an earlier New Thinking conversation with Rob about setting up the project in an episode called City Talk which is available in the New Research collection on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Robert McKenzie is Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics at Northumbria University. His project Speaking of Prejudice analyses both explicit and implicit attitudes towards accents in the South of England compared to the North, revealing that prejudices still exist towards particular accents and the effect on school progress and job opportunities. https://hosting.northumbria.ac.uk/languageattitudesengland/This podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. Producer: Tim Bano

From James Brown to Stockhausen, the influences which fed into Miles Davis's 1972 album On The Corner are explored by Matthew Sweet and guests, 50 years after its release. Bill Laswell, Chelsea Carmichael, Kevin LeGendre and Paul Tingen join Matthew to celebrate an album that was dismissed by some jazz critics as evidence of Davis 'selling out' when it came out, but that has gone on to be appreciated as an important and influential milestone.Producer: Torquil MacLeodBill Laswell's many recordings and productions include Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974. Chelsea Carmichael is a saxophonist and composer. Her most recent album is The River Doesn't Like Strangers. Paul Tingen is the author of Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991. Kevin Le Gendre is one of the presenters of BBC Radio 3's J to Z broadcast Saturdays at 5pmYou can hear Matthew and Kevin exploring the politics, history and music which fed into Marvin Gaye's What's Going On in a previous episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011l7t Radio 3 will be broadcasting a range of programmes from the London Jazz Festival between Nov 11th and 20th https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011l7t

The word 'reading' may appear to describe something specific and universal, but in reality it's more of an umbrella term, covering a huge range of ways in which people interact with text. Dyslexia and hyperlexia may be two of the more obvious departures from normative ideas of reading, but whether we're neurodivergent or not we all read in different ways that can vary significantly depending on what we're reading and why we're reading it. Matthew Sweet is joined by Matt Rubery, Louise Creechan and poets Debris Stevenson and Anthony Anaxagorou.Matt Rubery, Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary, University of London has worked on books including The Untold Story of the Talking Book; Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, Further Reading and Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences. You can hear more from him in an episode about the history of publishing called Whose Book is it Anyway? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080xzm6 Dr Louise Creechan is studying is a Lecturer in Literary Medical Humanities at Durham University and a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to showcase academic research. You can hear her discuss Dickens' Bleak House in an episode called Teaching and Inspiration https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00169jh Debris Stevenson describes herself as 'Dyslexic educator, Grime-poet and Dancehall raving social activist'. Anthony Anaxagorou's latest collection of poetry is Heritage Aesthetics, published on 3rd November 2022. Free Thinking has a playlist featuring discussions about prose and poetry https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vhThe theme of this year's National Poetry Day is the Environment and you can hear Radio 3's weekly curation of readings and music inspired by that topic on Sunday at 5.30pm and then on BBC Sounds for 28 days https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x35fProducer: Torquil MacLeod.