Free Thinking Folgen

Two years of staying inside her own home in Homs, whilst 60 per cent of her neighbourhood was turned into rubble hasn't deterred architect Marwa al-Sabouni. She talks to Anne McElvoy about rebuilding and hope. Adélie Chevée researches the use of media by the Syrian opposition, and Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an Egyptian-American translator, editor, and writer who spent 16 years working on a version of Songs of Mihyar the Damascene by Adonis, a poem which has been compared to TS Eliot's The Wasteland.Marwa al-Sabouni published The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria in 2016 and you can hear her talking to Free Thinking about Syrian Buildings https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076b15v Since then she's recorded a TED talk How Syria's architecture laid the foundation for a brutal war, advised the World Economic Forum, written for the Wall St Journal and is now publishing Building for Hope: Towards and Architecture of Belonging.Adonis was born into a farming family who couldn't afford the cost of a formal education but after reciting a poem to the president of Syria visiting his region, the teenager was supported by the president and enrolled in a French high school. He is now a leading Arabic poet based in Paris, who uses free verse, and a variety of forms to explore themes of migration and exile. His book Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, with translations by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Ivan Neubanks is a 200 page collection which has taken Kareem 16 years of work to bring to print.Adélie Chevée is a political scientist and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She has studied the use of media by the Syrian opposition and is now looking at the impact of fake news in Middle Eastern societies.You can find a playlist called Belonging, Home, Borders and National Identity on the Free Thinking website which includes conversations about Pakistan, Turkey, Hong Kong, France, India, Sweden and more https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mb66kProducer: Torquil MacLeod

From clues in paintings to colonial trade to letters sent between Australia and England; the links between a Durham based poet and India to the female singers and dancers from Latin America who were contemporaries of Picasso and Josephine Baker; the significance of the Cyrillic alphabet in building nations to why we should pay attention to brackets, commas and colons: African film and ideas about empire to depictions of Iran in nineteenth century French literature and art; how activism affects our view of art to law and the transatlantic slave trade: New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen talks to the ten academics whose ideas will become programmes for BBC Radio 3 as we introduce the 2021 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council.Dr Julia Hartley, University of Warwick Dr Florence Hazrat, University of Sheffield Dr Mirela Ivanova, University of Oxford Sarah Jilani, University of Cambridge Dr Jake Morris-Campbell, Newcastle University Adjoa Osei, University of Liverpool Dr Jake Richards, London School of Economics Dr Fariha Shaikh, University of Birmingham Dr Vid Simoniti, University of Liverpool Dr Lauren Working, University of OxfordProducer: Ruth WattsYou can find a playlist featuring discussions, essays and features made by the hundred New Generation Thinkers over ten years of the scheme on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35

Everyday lives from the past are often hard to reconstruct. As we prepare for the Census 2021, what stories can we tell from past censuses and the records held at Kew at the National Archives? John Gallagher is joined by four researchers whose work sheds light on women entrepreneurs, the health of residents in Brighton and Hastings, and the story of a house in a suburb of York - Tang Hall.Dr Carrie Van Lieshout from the Open University is working on a project called A Century of Migrant Businesswomen comparing census figures from 1911 to 2011.Audrey Collins is Records Specialist in Family History at the National Archives and the author of guides to tracing family history. Dr Deborah Madden from the University of Brighton looks at nineteenth century life writing, at public records and health, and is involved in a project which explores medical archival sources about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, including oral history interviews with descendants of families affected by that pandemic, and interviews with NHS key workers.Professor Krista Cowman at the University of Lincoln is researching women’s lives in a number of different contexts: as ‘war brides’ in France during World War One, as campaigners for post-war reconstruction in and out of Parliament in Britain, and in a number of community campaigns for safe play areas in the inter-and post-war period. She has worked on the history of a house in York's Tang Hall.This episode was made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI.You can find more conversations about New Research in a playlist on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Producer: Emma Wallace