The Essay

You are a liberal who opposes art being banned. But would a movie that calls for you to be killed change your view of censorship? This was the quandary facing Salman Rushdie when filmmakers in Pakistan produced a James Bond-style action thriller in which a trio of Islamist guerrillas are inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa to track down and kill the author of The Satanic Verses. In the year of the 30th anniversary of the fatwa against the novelist from Iranian clerics, film historian Dr Iain Robert Smith explores what this largely-forgotten episode from the Rushdie affair can tell us about current debates on freedom of expression. Iain Robert Smith researches the impact of globalisation on popular films made around the world. He teaches at King’s College, London. The Essay was recorded at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Fiona McLean

Was George Orwell’s wife his forgotten collaborator on one of the most famous books in the world? Lisa Mullen takes a new look at Animal Farm from the perspective of the smart and resourceful Eileen Blair – and uncovers a hidden story about sex, fertility, and the politics of women’s work. Why are some contributions less equal than others? Lisa Mullen is Steven Isenberg Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford and the author of Mid-century gothic: uncanny objects in British literature and culture after the Second World War. Her Essay is recorded with an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of the Free Thinking Festival and a longer version with audience questions is available as a BBC Arts&Ideas podcast. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. Production Team:- Producer: Fiona McLean Editor: Robyn Read Production Coordinator: Juliette Harvey .

Commercial surrogacy – the practice of paying another woman to carry a pregnancy to term – has been criticised for being exploitative, particularly when poorer women are recruited. Even if these women were paid more, and the exploitation element were reduced, would unease remain about “renting out” your body in this way? This essay from New Generation Thinker Gulzaar Barn will explore what, if anything, is different about the buying and selling of bodily services from other forms of trade. Should the body should be taken off the market?Gulzaar Barn taught philosophy at the University of Birmingham and is now researching at King’s College, London in the Dickson Poon School of Law. The Essay was recorded at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead and a longer version with audience questions is available as a BBC Arts&Ideas podcast. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Zahid Warley

Have you ever been somewhere you shouldn't? In this essay, New Generation Thinker Ben Anderson creeps around, and explains how trespassers in the early-twentieth century helped create new attitudes to nature by stepping off the path.Descriptions of late-nineteenth century trespass and rock-climbing show how different experiences of nature led to fights with landowners and gamekeepers for the rights of urban people. People going off-piste also led to efforts to expose environmental inequalities in the Alps, and calls for the protection of wilderness as a playground for hard men. At a time of ever increasing awareness of the environment, walk your thoughts around how our own, personal experience of nature defines what we come to value, and what we might fight to protect, alter or ‘improve’.Ben Anderson lectures in twentieth century history at Keele University. The Essay was recorded at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead and - like all the Essays this week - a longer version including audience questions is available as an Arts& Ideas podcast. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Daisy Black looks at religious imagery, food, anti-Semitism and product placement in medieval mystery plays. Eaten by characters, dotted around the stage as saliva-prompting props, or nibbled by audiences - a medieval religious drama is glutted with food but Christianity’s vision of God as spiritual nutrition could provoke horror and fear as well as hunger. We'll hear about some of the gristly, crunchy medieval episodes of culinary performance as the Essay investigates the relationship between faith and food. In one play, sacramental bread is attacked in a kitchen, drawing disturbing parallels between the Eucharist and cannibalism. Daisy Black lectures in English at the University of Wolverhampton and performs as a storyteller and freelance theatre director. Her essay was recorded at this year's Free Thinking Festival with an audience at Sage Gateshead.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Luke Mulhall

Des Fitzgerald tracks the relationship between the modern city and its green environs. Drawing together psychological research with urban history and literature it asks: what would change, psychologically, socially, emotionally, if we covered the concrete and brickwork of our towns and cities with vines, plants and vertical gardens? A city is not a park but should it be? Des Fitzgerald is a sociologist at Cardiff University who is researching health, illness and city living. The Essay was recorded at the Free Thinking Festival with an audience at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Comedian and author Viv Groskop explores five forgotten feminist futures; from the book that predicted the internet, to the world where men have been wiped out in a plague.Episode 5/5: Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy; a 1970s counter-culture agrarian utopia with a clear message; utopia does not have to be in the future, it can be now.

Comedian and author Viv Groskop explores five forgotten feminist futures. Episode 4/5: The Female Man, by Joanna Russ, which tells four versions of the same woman, a complex narrative which prefigures many of the sci-fi tropes of 1970s and 1980s cinema.

Comedian and author Viv Groskop explores five forgotten feminist futures; from the book that predicted the internet to the world where men have been wiped out in a gender-specific plague. Episode 3/5: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story of three gentleman explorers, who get purposefully lost on an expedition in the hope of stumbling across an all-women tribe.

Comedian and author Viv Groskop explores five forgotten feminist futures. Episode 2/5: Mizora: A Prophecy, the 19th-century narrative written by author Mary E Bradley, who didn’t want her husband to find out that she was writing about a world without men.