Arts & Ideas Folgen

John Gallagher digs deep into the significance of soil with food grower and gardener Claire Ratinon, Dr Jim Scown, who has researched the role of soil in the novels of Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and Anna da Silva, Project Director of Northern Roots, the UK’s largest urban farm and eco-park in the heart of Oldham in Greater Manchester. And philosopher and art historian Vid Simoniti reviews two major new exhibitions exploring our relationship with the world around us - Radical Landscapes at Tate Liverpool and Our Time on Earth at the Barbican in London.Producer: Ruth Thomson'Unearthed: On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong' by Claire Ratinon is published next month. Radical Landscapes runs at Tate Liverpool from 5 May – 4 Sep 2022 featuring over 150 artworks and live trees and plants in the gallery. Our Time on Earth runs at the Curve Gallery at the Barbican Centre from Thu 5 May—Mon 29 Aug 2022 Jim Scown is a 2022 New Generation Thinker at Cardiff University on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio. Vid Simoniti is a 2021 New Generation Thinker who teaches on art and philosophy at the University of Liverpool https://www.vidsimoniti.com/You can find a collection of programmes on the Free Thinking website exploring Green Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2

TV shows Hinterland and Hidden are bilingual using Welsh and English. Caryl Lewis, who has written scripts for these TV dramas and award-winning novels, joins Catherine Fletcher for an exploration of Cymraeg, the Welsh language. We hear from Richard King, whose book Brittle with Relics is an oral history of Wales in the second half of the twentieth century, Dr Elen Ifan from Cardiff University, and composer, performer and actor Seiriol Davies, whose new musical Milky Peaks is set in the 'bosom of Snowdonia'. Caryl Lewis's many novels include Martha, Jac a Sianco and Y Gemydd and she has just published her first novel written first in English and it is called Drift. Producer: Ruth Thomson

How decoding Erewash, Trent, Averham and other field, river and place names from old maps can help us understand flooding patterns in Britain. Dr Richard Jones, Associate Professor of Landscape History at the University of Leicester is one of Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough’s guests. Her second guest is Dr Rebecca Wright, a Social and Cultural Historian of Energy from Northumbria University.The research projects featured are:Flood and Flow: https://waternames.wordpress.com/team/ Forthcoming manuscript Moral Energy in America: From the Progressive Era to the Atomic Bomb which explores the birth of an ‘energy consciousness’ in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.This episode was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI Producer: Paula McFarlaneYou can find more conversations about New Research gathering into a playlist on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90