Arts & Ideas

Anne McElvoy debates at the Free Thinking Festival with intensive care doctor Aoife Abbey, GP & Prof Louise Robinson, Naeem Soomro expert in using robotic surgery and Michael Brown medical historian. Does emotion have any place in relationships with patients in a more open age? Medical professionals are trained to adopt “clinical distance” when dealing with patients. Tradition says that getting emotional weakens their judgement of medical evidence and can cause safeguarding issues. But how can those in caring roles prevent disinterest seeming like un-interest? Aoife Abbey is a doctor working in Intensive Care whose book Seven Signs of Life is an account of her experiences told through the emotions she encounters on a daily basis. Aoife previously wrote a blog as The Secret Doctor for the British Medical Association and works on a national training programme for doctors in intensive care medicine. She is a council member of the Intensive Care Society (UK). Michael Brown is a cultural historian at the University of Roehampton who is currently leading a project for the Wellcome Trust entitled Surgery & Emotion exploring this relationship from 1800 to the present. He is the author of Performing Medicine: Medical Culture and Identity in Provincial England, c. 1760-1850Louise Robinson is Director of Newcastle University’s Institute for Ageing, Professor of Primary Care and Ageing and a GP. She leads one of only three Alzheimer Society national Centres of Excellence on Dementia Care and is a member of the national dementia care guidelines development group.Dr Naeem Soomro is Leading Consultant Urologist at Freeman Hospital, Newcastle. He has pioneered minimally invasive and robotic surgery in the North East and has developed the biggest multi-speciality robotic surgery program in the UK.Producer: Fiona McLean

You don't have to be religious to believe that, as the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "all human beings have the right to be free and treated equally." However, drawing on a wide range of examples including Shakespeare's Richard III to Disney's Jiminy Cricket, New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel argues that the UN's emphasis on "reason and conscience" as the drivers of liberty and equality make the modern conception of human rights more religious, and less liberal, than both secular proponents and conservative critics have supposed. Dafydd Mills Daniel is the McDonald Departmental Lecturer in Christian Ethics and Theology at Jesus College, University of Oxford. He is researching Newton and alchemyThe 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: Jacqueline Smith

Michael Talbot asks how can power be exerted over water? What do borders mean in the featureless desert of the ocean? These were questions faced by the Ottoman Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries when an imaginary line was used to create a legally enforced border at sea for the Sultans in Istanbul who called themselves “rulers of the two seas”, the Black and the Mediterranean. Michael Talbot lectures about the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich, London. The Essay was recorded at Sage Gateshead as part of the Free Thinking Festival. 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

Sarah Moss is a novelist and Professor at the University of Warwick. Her most recent book Ghost Wall articulates the tangled space of love, abuse and resistance. Her previous novels include Cold Earth, Night Waking, Signs for Lost Children and The Tidal Zone. She has written for The Guardian, New Statesman, The Independent and BBC Radio.Michael Richardson is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Newcastle University. He has longstanding research interests in masculinities and intergenerational relationships on post-industrial Tyneside. He is a trustee of North East Young Dads and Lads project and works closely with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books.Harriet Shawcross is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. Her first book Unspeakable reflects on how, as a teenager, she stopped speaking at school for almost a year, communicating only when absolutely necessary. It mixes personal experience with travel diaries and interviews including Eve Ensler creator of The Vagina Monologues.Una is a comics artist and writer. Her first graphic novel Becoming Unbecoming is about Una’s own encounters with sexual violence and survival. Her other titles include On Sanity: One Day In Two Lives and Cree, commissioned by New Writing North and Durham Book Festival.Producer: Luke Mulhall

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

Can we ever really know the feelings of byegone generations? Author and TV historian Tracy Borman shares the clues we have to the emotional lives of Tudor royalty and archaeologist Penny Spikins explains what million year old human remains tell us about how prehistoric people felt. Paul Pickering explores what we know about the emotions of the Manchester Chartists and the way songs have carried political feelings. New Generation Thinker Elsa Richardson teaches a course on the history of emotions. Rana Mitter hosts with an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead Tracy Borman is joint Chief Curator for Historic Royal Palaces, Chief Executive of the Heritage Education Trust. Her books include Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him, The Private Life of the Tudors, Thomas Cromwell: The Hidden Story Of Henry VIII's Most Faithful ServantPenny Spikins is Senior Lecturer in the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of York. Her books include How Compassion Made Us Human looking at archaeological evidence for the earliest examples of healthcare, and Neanderthal social lives. Paul Pickering is a Professor and Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University. The author of books on subjects ranging from C19 radical politics in the British world, monuments and public memory, re-enactment history - his most recent, Sounds of Liberty, is about music and politics. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Durham University working in a team studying the question: 'Who are the People?'Elsa Richardson became a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2018. She teaches on the history of the emotions and is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.Producer: Craig Smith

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.

According to Madmen’s ad executive Don Draper, “what you call love was invented by guys like me… to sell nylons.” So how does advertising and gaming grab us by our emotions? Can we know when we’re being manipulated? And is there anything we can do about it? Presenter Shahidha Bari hosts a Free Thinking Festival debate at Sage Gateshead.Ad man Robert Heath worked on campaigns including the Marlboro Cowboy, Castrol GTX Liquid Engineering, and Heineken “Refreshes the Parts”. He is the author of The Hidden Power of Advertising and Seducing the Subconscious: The Psychology of Emotional Influence in Advertising.Claudia Hammond presents All in the Mind and Mind Changers on BBC Radio 4 and Health Check on BBC World Service. She is the author of Emotional Rollercoaster: A journey through the science of feelings and Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception and Mind over Money: the psychology of money and how to use it better.Darshana Jayemanne is Lecturer in Games and Art at Abertay University. He is investigating the role of emotion in young people's digital play (collaborating with the NSPCC) and how this can be used to raise awareness of climate change (along with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research).May Abdalla is co-director and founder of Anagram - a studio which won the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award for Door Into The Dark - a blindfolded sensory experience about what it means to be lost. They are working on a VR experience about the Uncanny with the Freud Museum and an immersive documentary about imagined realities exploring schizophrenia and online gaming.

Harriet Shawcross is a film-maker whose first book Unspeakable reflects on how, as a teenager, she stopped speaking at school for almost a year, communicating only when absolutely necessary. It mixes personal experience with travel diaries and interviews. Ambassador William J. Burns is known as America’s ‘secret diplomatic weapon’. Having served five presidents and ten secretaries of state, he has been central to the past four decades’ most consequential foreign policy episodes. Now retired from the US Foreign Service, he is President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has written The Back Channel: American Diplomacy in a Disordered World. Kathryn Tickell is widely acclaimed as the world’s foremost exponent of the Northumbrian pipes. Presenter for BBC Radio 3's "Music Planet" she has just released Hollowbone with her new band The Darkening. Thomas Dixon was the first director of Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions. He is currently researching anger and has explored the histories of friendship, tears, and the British stiff upper lip in books Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears and The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. He gave the Free Thinking Lecture 2019 which you can also find as a BBC Arts&Ideas podcast.

What was more important in the construction of an eighteenth-century man’s body: the dumbbell or the dumbwaiter? Who had the most enviable body shape: the svelte Apollo Belvedere or the rotund John Bull? Dr Sarah Goldsmith, from the University of Leicester, explores the early origins of modern gym culture in the tantalisingly elusive and occasionally surprisingly sweaty world of eighteenth-century male physicality.Sarah Goldsmith is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centure for Urban History and School of History, University of Leicester.Her Essay was recorded in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of this year's Free Thinking Festival.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.