The Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC are gearing up to hold workshops for their New Generation Thinkers scheme. Helen Lock asks two past winners for insights on this highly competitive funding opportunity.
Could you be the next Richard Dawkins? Or is pop philosopher Alain de Botton more your style? The AHRC has been working with the BBC to search for the next generation of public intellectuals. The 2014 scheme is now closed to new entrants, but there will be a new call for the start of 2015. The New Generation Thinkers scheme is aimed primarily at humanities academics, and gives access to media training, a radio producer as a mentor, and the chance to pitch ideas to the BBC’s arts channels. Successful candidates also get to present a 15-minute radio essay at BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking Festival in October, make short films for TV and potentially take part in Radio 3’s debate programme Free Thinking.
Last year, about 300 people applied. For the forthcoming round, the scheme has opened up to include subjects that cross over with the humanities but are supported by other research councils. For example, researchers of elements of psychology and linguistics normally supported by the Economic and Social Research Council are encouraged to apply.
Two winners from the 2013 round are Christopher Harding and Rebecca Steinfeld. Harding is a cultural historian specialising in religion, psychotherapy and spirituality in India and Japan. He teaches the modern history of these countries at the University of Edinburgh. Steinfeld, whose research focuses on genital cutting and the politics of reproduction in Israel, is a visiting scholar in the history department at Stanford University in California.
Feminism, food and Freud
So far, Steinfeld has pitched ideas for radio programmes on feminism and food. She has also written for The Conversation and The Huffington Post. Harding has had a documentary on Freud in Asia commissioned for Radio 3’s Sunday features and has written for Aeon online magazine.
Steinfeld had finished her PhD in politics at the University of Oxford and was halfway through a teaching fellowship at the University of Birmingham when she applied. She says she was inspired by the podcasts she had enjoyed listening to during her doctoral research and wanted to learn the skills required to make them, as well as to get people engaged with her research.
Harding agrees. “It sounded like a wonderful opportunity to work directly with professionals at the BBC and see whether my work would be of interest to a bigger audience.”
In the media
Before applying for places on the scheme, both researchers already had a small amount of media work on their CVs.
Harding had created a blog, The Boredom Project, about his research and related news stories. He had also been given some journalism training on a major Japanese newspaper thanks to a post-PhD scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.
Steinfeld started writing for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper during the scheme, to which she now contributes regularly. “Before it I had also coauthored an article about the ethics and legality of non-therapeutic infant male circumcision for The Guardian, and written a follow-up piece in The Jewish Chronicle,” she says, “but I wanted to share my research with an even wider audience.”
Presence and presentation
Harding says that having an online presence helps you to develop a popular writing voice and helps producers to get hold of you. But it was not just blogging that stood him in good stead for the scheme. “The classroom helps you prepare for it. When you are lecturing to students and they’ve probably got Facebook up on their laptops, you’ve got to hold their attention without dumbing down the material. You find different ways of presenting information, choosing vivid examples or changing the order.”
The AHRC’s programme manager for the scheme, Danielle Moore-Chick, says thinking about the audience is perhaps the most important thing prospective applicants should consider. Any research topic will work, she says: the skill is in presenting it. “Think of the human element and what motivated you to study your subject in the first place. Think of the examples from your research that you tell your friends at the pub. That’s a good place to start.”
Sharp elbows
Applicants in 2013 and 2014 were asked for a 250-word synopsis of how their research would work as a radio programme, and a 250-word review of a recent cultural event. After that, 60 shortlisted candidates were invited to attend a workshop. Steinfeld says the day involved working in groups, offering critiques of programmes and each other’s pitches, and presenting 150-second pitches to camera. Candidates also debated randomly selected topics so that producers could assess their ability to argue and think on their feet.
Moore-Chick says that, at the workshop stage, candidates are given advice on what they could improve. They also learn about which aspects of their research would work best in a TV or radio programme. “Candidates find out what works and what doesn’t, and get to hone what they already have. We would always encourage them to apply again next year if they don’t get past the workshop stage.” Indeed, Harding only made it to the workshop stage the first time he applied.
Steinfeld and Harding say the workshop was a fun and useful experience, albeit with “quite a lot of competitive sharp elbowing”. You feel all day that you are being assessed, says Harding. "Even when you ask questions in response to the BBC producers talking to you, it feels as though you should constantly promote yourself as being engaging or witty.”
On the pitch
The need to be self-confident continues once you are chosen for the scheme. “In the pitching process you compete with all the big names,” says Harding. “The producer I was linked with was really receptive and you are not patronised in any way. It’s just that a lot of academic research overlaps with the work of journalists, film-makers and novelists, so you have to really push yourself to be there too and get a seat at the table.”
“In a way, though, we’ve already pitched to the BBC by having the scheme,” says Moore-Chick. “It creates a foundation and expectations are set, so the researchers aren’t going in cold. Producers often go for people they have heard of before, so it does help to have that connection set up. That’s why the BBC wants to take part in New Generation Thinkers—to find new people.”
Bridging the gap
Harding warns that it would be a mistake for a researcher to take part hoping to become a full-time member of the media. “The programme is intended to build bridges between the BBC and the latest research; if you were to leave academia, you would no longer be that bridge.”
And in terms of academic careers, neither Steinfeld nor Harding thought the experience would help them move up the academic career ladder. “Sadly, your commitment to public engagement could be misconstrued or misinterpreted as showing a lack of commitment to traditional academic work,” says Steinfeld. The scheme is also time-consuming, so you need to balance research, writing, publishing and teaching with broadcasting.
But the extra effort can pay dividends in other ways. Both researchers say they have received positive responses to their work and, as well as helping in their teaching and public speaking roles, the experience has inspired research ideas. “It has been a big confidence boost,” says Steinfeld, “and you can’t overestimate the impact of that sort of lift.“
“You get questions from the public, via email or on Twitter. My research is something that everyone has some experience of: religion, spirituality and mental health,” says Harding. “There is a massive interest from the general public in finding out what goes on at universities. I was surprised by that—heartened by it.”
Moore-Chick’s final pieces of advice are to listen to Radio 3 first to get a sense of the programming and to not worry about editors changing your research. “The reason you become a New Generation Thinker is because you’re an expert; there would be no need otherwise. So academic rigour is maintained.”