Free Thinking30 Jan 2021

What Makes a Good Lecture?

Mary Beard, Homi Bhabha and Seán Williams join Shahidha Bari to look at the etiquette of talks on zoom and the history of lectures. Lecturing someone can be a negative: you’re patronising or boring or telling them what to think. And yet, today we have TED talks, university staff are routinely recording lectures using video conferencing technology, and the history of thought is a history of persuasive speakers setting out their ideas before audiences.

Dr Seán Williams is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker who lectures in German intellectual and cultural history at the University of Sheffield. Mary Beard is a Dame and Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and has given various lectures at universities, the British Museum and the London Review of Books, the Society for Classical Studies, the Gifford Lecture Series. She also presents on TV and has authored many books. Homi Bhabha is a Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and is the author of many books. He considers Memory and Migration in this Free Thinking Lecture recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005gt9

Readings: Ewan Bailey

Other programmes exploring aspects of language: What is Speech : Matthew Sweet's guests include Trevor Cox and Rebecca Roache https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3 The Impact of Being Multi-Lingual: John Gallagher talks to Katrin Kohl, Rajinder Dudrah and Wen-chin Ouyang https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mq6k Language and Belonging: Preti Taneja's guests include Michael Rosen, Guy Gunaratne and Momtaza Mehri https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07fvbhn The Free Thinking Festival Lecture on Feelings from Professor Thomas Dixon https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003rsw The Free Thinking Festival Lecture on Knowledge from Karen Armstrong https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02tw41j

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(1526)

The Ethics of Knowledge

Do we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the state of the world? Is the experience of some people valued more highly than that of others? Matthew Sweet investigates the ethics of knowledg...

10 Juli 56min

Trade and Traffic

What does trade set in motion beyond the exchange of goods? Anne McElvoy explores the movement of commerce across time as a carrier of habits, ideas, ambitions and influence, as well as of material th...

3 Juli 56min

The Child's Eye View

Shahidha Bari investigates the child’s-eye view of the world. From navigating AI to living through war and the joys of reading, what makes children’s perspectives so distinctive? With writer Katherine...

26 Juni 56min

Eccentrics & Outsiders

How has the figure of the outsider or eccentric been used to explore English culture, history, politics, and our relationship with nature and the countryside? Matthew Sweet discusses, including a re-r...

19 Juni 56min

Satire and Gulliver's Travels

300 years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Matthew Sweet looks at satire, past and present. How can satirists reflect critically and humorously on political events in an a...

12 Juni 56min

Wealth

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish ec...

5 Juni 56min

Free Thinking at the Hay Festival: Responsibility

Freedom is one of the leading values of our society. But with freedom comes responsibility, which is a much more contested principle. Deciding where responsibility lies, and what it means to take it, ...

29 Maj 56min

Thinking with Food

The links between food and philosophy, ideas about experimentation, taste and how food and traditions become part of our identity are explored by Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round-table discussion prog...

22 Maj 56min