Arts & Ideas

From Bitcoin mines to green investment bonds: how easy is it to change the way finance works to make it greener? Professor Yu Xiong and Professor Nick Robins share their research, knowledge and concerns of these high-tech financial systems with Professor Des Fitzgerald. Professor Yu Xiong is Associate Dean International and director of the Centre for Innovation and Commercialization at the Surrey Business School, University of Surrey. His research focuses on sustainability and technological issues with global supply chains, as well as cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Professor Nick Robins is Professor in Practice – Sustainable Finance at the London School of Economics. His work focuses on how to mobilise finance for climate change, and how financial systems can support the restoration of nature. You can read blog posts by Nick Robins on his research here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/profile/nick-robins/#newsProfessor Des Fitzgerald is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Exeter.You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: https://www.ukri.org/our-work/responding-to-climate-change/ or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast.Producer: Marcus Smith

From Frankie Howerd to Sherlock: Beryl Vertue is the producer of some classic TV shows including Men Behaving Badly. She took Steptoe and Son to America, negotiated for writer Terry Nation to retain some of the rights for his Dr Who Daleks creation, and back when she began in the 1960s, worked with a Who's Who of comedy writing talent at Associated London Scripts as well as representing Tony Hancock and Frankie Howerd as their agent. As chairman of the family firm Hartswood Films, her more recent projects have included revamping Dracula and Sherlock for TV. She discusses the successes and failures she has had in her six decade career with Matthew Sweet and shares with him what it was like working with Ken Russell and Tina Turner on Tommy and what she thinks makes a good deal.Producer: Torquil MacLeodYou can find other conversations about classic TV in the Free Thinking archives including Quatermass: Nigel Kneale's groundbreaking 1950s TV sci-fi series with Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Una McCormack , Claire Langhamer and Matthew Kneale https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b03y The Goodies: Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie talk to Matthew Sweet about how humour changes and the targets of their TV comedy show which ran during the '70s and early '80s https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000hcb British TV and film producer Tony Garnett talks to Matthew Sweet about a career which encompassed the Wednesday Play for the BBC, This Life and Undercover. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07h6r8l

A Bouillabaisse soup inspired hat paraded by the surrealist artist Eileen Agar in 1948 caused raised eyebrows to the passers-by captured in the Pathé news footage on show in the Whitechapel Gallery's exhibition exploring her career. It's just one of many displays showcasing women's art open this summer at galleries across the UK, so today's Free Thinking looks at what it means to put women's art back on the walls and into the way we look at art history. Shahidha Bari is joined by Whitechapel curator Lydia Yee, by Frieze editor-at-large and podcaster Jennifer Higgie, by New Generation Thinker Adjoa Osei, who specialises in studying the contribution of Afro Latin-American women artists, and by the artist Veronica Ryan. Her work runs from a neon crocheted fishing line, to bronze and clay sculptures, and work made from tea-stained fabrics.Veronica Ryan: Along A Spectrum runs at Spike Island, Bristol, from 19 May 19 to 5 September 2021. Her sculptures responding to the work of Barbara Hepworth feature in Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life at the Hepworth Wakefield 21 May 2021 – 27 Feb 2022, and in Breaking The Mould: Sculpture By Women Since 1945 - An Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition, which opens at the Longside Gallery at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park 29 May–5 Sep 2021.Eileen Agar: Angel Of Anarchy runs at the Whitechapel Gallery 19 May - 29 Aug 2021, alongside another focus on women artists in Phantoms of Surrealism 19 May - 12 Dec 2021.Jennifer Higgie's book The Mirror And The Palette: Rebellion, Revolution And Resilience - 500 Years Of Women's Self Portraits is out now, and she presents a podcast, Bow Down: Women In Art.Adjoa Osei is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to put their research on radio.You can also find exhibitions of The Life And Legacy of Constance Spry at the Garden Museum; Ellen Harvey and Barbara Walker at Turner Contemporary; Infinity Mirror Rooms by Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern; Charlotte Perriand - The Modern Life at the Design Museum; Paula Rego at Tate Britain; Karla Black at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh; Sophie Tauber-Arp coming to Tate Modern; and Joan Eardley's centenary marked at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh.Producer: Emma WallaceImage: Veronica Ryan Courtesy: Alison Jacques, London, and Create, London; photo: Lisa Whiting

How real are flooding dangers in Britain and Ireland? Two researchers who have been working with local communities in Wales, Norfolk and Ireland tell Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough about the impact of changing landscapes, how sand dunes beat concrete, and how audio postcodes can help the people of Norfolk reflect on their with local wildlife along the longest protected coast in Europe. Dr Emma McKinley is a research fellow at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Cardiff University, and her research focuses on understanding the connections and emotions between society and the sea. Emma is also Manager of the Severn Estuary Partnership which brings people together to protect and benefit the Severn Estuary. You can read more about the partnership and get involved here: https://severnestuarypartnership.org.ukProfessor George Revill is part of the School of Social Sciences and Global Studies at the Open University. His project ‘Listening to Climate Change’ is focusing on North Norfolk, using sound and music to encourage local people to think about their relationship with the sea landscape. You can read more about the project and watch some of the project videos here: https://heritage-research.org/case-studies/sounding-coastal-changelistening-climate-change-experiments-sonic-democracy/Dr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Durham. You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion. The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: https://www.ukri.org/our-work/responding-to-climate-change/ or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast. Producer: Sofie Vilcins

Is climate change to blame for global conflicts and disputes over resources? Or is this rush to blame water shortages just post-Colonial thinking? Dr Ayesha Siddiqi and Professor Jan Selby talk to Professor Des Fitzgerald talk about their research, where geography and politics collide.Dr Ayesha Siddiqi is a development and postcolonial geographer at the University of Cambridge. She shares her expertise in natural disasters and politics, security and development in the Global South. Professor Jan Selby is Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. His work focuses on climate change, water, and politics, with a focus on the Israeli-Palestinian confict.Professor Des Fitzgerald is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Exeter.You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit https://www.ukri.org/our-work/responding-to-climate-change/ or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast. Producer: Marcus Smith

How green is office working? Have changes since Covid helped us plan for a more environmentally friendly way of working? Philosopher Dr Alexander Douglas and Dr Jane Parry, who works on Work after Lockdown, talk to Des Fitzgerald about the future of work in a post-Covid-19 world and the implications for our environment.Dr Alexander Douglas is a Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is a founder and co-director of the Future of Work and Income Research Network (funded by AHRC) at the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs.Dr Jane Parry is a Lecturer and Director of Research for HRM and Organisational Behaviour within Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. She is the Principal Investigator on the project, Work after Lockdown, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (part of UKRI). You can read more about the project and contribute to their worker wellbeing survey at https://www.workafterlockdown.uk/participate.Professor Des Fitzgerald is a New Generation Thinker based at the University of Exeter.You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Des Fitzgerald and Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion.The podcasts are all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2For more information about the research the AHRC’s supports around climate change and the natural world you can visit: Responding to climate change – UKRI or follow @ahrcpress on twitter. To join the discussion about the research covered in this podcast and the series please use the hashtag #GreenThinkingPodcast. Producer: Marcus Smith

Is encouraging action still art? What does it mean to make art about the environment? Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough brings together a curator, researchers and artists to discuss these questions. She hears about suggestions from artists, inspired by the forward thinking Gustav Metzger (1926 - 2017), collated by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. These include the idea from Futurefarmers that we "make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer's bookshelf" or Forensic Architecture's call for us to "Look at an air bubble" or Olafur Eliasson's "Look down, look up" and a poetic call to action inspired by the writer Audre Lorde (1934-1992): you can find an episode all about her work in the Free Thinking archives. Lucy Neal describes a project that has involved a forest camp in Coventry looking back at the ideas of the suffragettes. Wayne Binitie shares his experiences of taking photographs of melting ice sheets, recreating them in a gallery and making sound and music. Dr Jenna C. Ashton describes her work with communities in Manchester thinking about how they face up to changes in the climate and reflect those in a pageant planned for next year.140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kostas Stasinopoulos is published now - and draws on the environmental programme Back to Earth run by the Serpentine Gallery where Obrist is an Artistic Director https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/ You can find out more about his paintings and photographs at http://waynebinitie.com/ and an exhibition of his work is due to open later this year. Walking Forest by the artists Ruth Ben-Tovim, Anne-Marie Culhane, Lucy Neal and Shelley Castle, commissioned by Coventry 2021 City of Culture is one of the 15 Season For Change arts commissions ahead of COP 26 https://www.seasonforchange.org.uk/ Dr Jenna C. Ashton is a Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the University of Manchester and co-founded CIWA, the Centre for International Women Artists, a collective artist studio and gallery in Manchester, UK https://creative-climate-resilience.org/You can find a new podcast series Green Thinking: 26 episodes 26 minutes long in the run up to COP26 made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI, exploring the latest research and ideas around understanding and tackling the climate and nature emergency. New Generation Thinkers Dr Des Fitzgerald and Dr Eleanor Barraclough will be in conversation with researchers on a wide-range of subjects from cryptocurrencies and finance to eco poetry and fast fashion. They're all available from the Arts & Ideas podcast feed - and collected on the Free Thinking website under Green Thinking where you can also find programmes on mushrooms, forests, rivers, eco-criticism and soil. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2Producer: Sofie Vilcins

"Before there were books there were stories". Salman Rushdie's opening words in his collected Essays from 2003-2020. In one of them he reveals that Alice in Wonderland made such an impression on him as a child that he can still recite Jabberwocky. So Free Thinking brought him together with the literary historian Lucy Powell and with Mark Blacklock, who has studied literature about the fourth dimension, for a conversation about the power of dreams, the place of logic and irrationality and the truth of maths - inspired by the new exhibition about Alice in Wonderland on at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Matthew Sweet hosts the discussion.Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from 22nd May 2021 Salman Rushdie's Essay Collection is called Languages of Truth. You can find him discussing Uncertainty and his novel The Golden House in a previous Free Thinking. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09784ld Lucy Powell is a New Generation Thinker whose research has included looking at birds in fiction. You can find her discussing birds with Helen MacDonald and Professor Tim Birkhead in a Proms Plus discussion https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06fw7db Mark Blacklock is the author of a novel called Hinton which explores the thinking of Charles Hinton about the fourth dimension. You can find him discussing that in a Free Thinking episode called Alternative Realities https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hftd He also shares his knowledge about HG Wells in a programme called Wells' Women https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b4r1xLate Junction on BBC Radio 3 has been asking people to send in their dreams to the artist Sam Potter. He's created an AI programme dream machine which morphs these into texts which composers have then worked on. If you tune into Late Junction on Friday nights BBC Radio 3 11pm throughout June you can hear the dreamlike results https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tp52Producer: Luke Mulhall

Should Kew re-label its plants? What do you see when you study a still life painting on the gallery walls? How do nineteenth century authors depict deadly plants? New Generation Thinker Christienna Fryar discusses new ways of understanding British history through horticulture with her four guests: Lauren Working, is one of the 2021 New Generation Thinkers. She has studied the Jamestown colony, and delivers a postcard about still life painting and its connection to the exotic luxuries of early empire building. Her book is called The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis. Katie Donington, has worked on a British botanist and plant collector George Hibbert who made his money from the plants on the sugar plantations, and then paid for specimens to be brought back to England from one of James Cook's expeditions. Daisy Butcher, has edited a collection called The Botanical Gothic, which brings together 19th century stories about deadly plants, mostly plants brought back to the UK from far-flung parts of the world that turn out to be threatening. Sharon Willoughby, head of interpretation at Kew Gardens, is looking at the way Kew presents its collections, starting for example, to use Chinese names for Chinese plants which were well known to Chinese scholars before the plant collectors arrived from countries including Britain to bring specimens to display here.You might be interested in the Free Thinking discussion looking at Darwin's The Descent of Man https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s31z Napoleon the gardener and art thief is discussed by guests including biographer Ruth Scurr https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vr1w Trees of Knowledge hears from Peter Wohlleben and Emanuele Coccia https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001nj1 And an upcoming episode of The Verb with Ian McMillan on June 11th will hear more from Peter Wohlleben and from poet Jason Allen-Paisant We are also launching a podcast made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council - Green Thinking - which features academic research into the issues linking the climate challenge and society. You can find that on the Green Thinking playlist on our programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 and available to download as the Arts & Ideas podcast.New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to share their research on the radio. This episode was made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI. You can find a playlist exploring New Research on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90Image: The Temperate House at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Credit: Paul Kerley / BBC

'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence'. Thus ends the only book the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. But it's a book that's had people talking ever since it was published a century years ago. In an event hosted by the Austrian Cultural Forum, and in collaboration with the British Wittgenstein Society, Shahidha Bari discusses the contexts and contents of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at 100 with Wittgenstein's biographer Ray Monk, the philosophers Juliet Floyd and Dawn Wilson, and Wittgenstein's niece Monica Nadler Wittgenstein.In the Preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein claims to have solved all the problems of philosophy. The youngest son of one of the wealthiest families in Europe, based in Vienna, Ludwig moved to England in 1908 to study the then cutting edge-topic of flight aerodynamics. From there he developed an interest in pure mathematics, which led him to philosophy, and to the revolutionary work of the logician Gottlob Frege. Frege recommended he went to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell, who quickly recognised him as "perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived".The work that Wittgenstein began in Cambridge eventually led to the composition of the Tractatus, but not before the intervention of the First World War, during which he signed up to the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought in some of the fiercest battles on the Eastern Front, even volunteering for an observation post in no-man's-land. Finished whilst he was still in military service, the Tractatus combines an innovative account of the nature of logic with searching investigation of personhood and mysticism. Written in an aphoristic style that seems to conceal as much as it reveals, it is a major work of Viennese Modernism as well as a foundational text of analytical philosophy.You can find a playlist of conversations about philosophy on the Free Thinking website which include Wolfram Eilenberger, David Edmonds, Esther Leslie with Matthew Sweet looking at the different philosophical schools current in the 1920s Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman on reclaiming the role of women in British 20th century philosophy Stephen Mulhall and Denis McManus, and the historian and New Generation Thinker Tiffany Watt Smith on Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twxProducer: Luke Mulhall