Thinking Allowed Folgen

Walking in the city: The flaneur and flaneuse. Laurie Taylor presents a themed programme which explores the history and meaning of the urban stroller, past and present. Keith Tester, Adjunct Professor at the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, charts the origins of the 'Flaneur'; the "man of the crowd" of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, and one of the heroes of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Matthew Beamont, co-director of University College London's Urban Lab, contends that the city idler isn't simply a by product of modernism, illuminating London's past via the nocturnal wanderings of poets, novelists and thinkers. And Lauren Elkin, lecturer in the department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris, counters the implicit assumption that the city belongs to a figure of masculine privilege and leisure. She introduces us to the transgressive 'flaneuse' who claims the right to city space.Producer: Jayne Egerton.

Happiness - Should the government promote it? Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, talks to Laurie Taylor about the necessity to inspire a better politics with new measures of what matters most to us. These would include the avoidance of misery, the gaining of long term life satisfaction, the feeling of fulfilment, of worth, of kindness, of usefulness and love. Politicians, he contends, should promote a collective good which incorporates these priorities. They're joined by Paul Ormerod, economist and Visiting Professor at UCL Centre for Decision Making Uncertainty, who contends that policymakers should not claim that they can increase happiness through public policy decisions.Also, do dominant ideals of 'good' parenting contain a class bias? Esther Dermott. Professor of Sociology, argues that the activities of the most educationally advantaged parents are accepted as the benchmark against whom others are assessed.Producer: Jayne Egerton.

The winner of the 2016 British Sociological Association & Thinking Allowed Ethnography award, Maxim Bolt, Lecturer in Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Birmingham, talks to Laurie Taylor about his groundbreaking study of insecure lives on the border farms between Zimbabwe and South Africa. How do people create homes and stability in times of mass unemployment and uncertainty? Also, transcultural sport: Max Mauro, Associate Lecturer in Sports Studies at Southampton Solent University, considers young Congolese migrants establishing a sense of belonging in a Dublin football team.Producer: Jayne Egerton.