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Social Studies of Neuroscience DirectoryThis page is intended as a resource for scholars who may be interested in learning more about who’s doing what in social studies of neuroscience, biological psychiatry, and allied disciplines. If you would like to join the ENSN and be added to our Social Studies of Neuroscience Directory, please enter your details in the online form or email your name, affiliation, description of research interests (200 words or less) & website details to ensn@lse.ac.uk. ADr. Joelle Abi-Rached
Micah Allen
Richard Ashcroft I am interested in the bioethical aspects of research in and applications of the neurosciences and psychiatry, and in particular at the analogies and disanalogies with genetics, issues in clinical trials, and the conceptual aspects of neuroscience explanations of behaviour. I was a participant in the UK MRC’s neuroethics workshop, and chaired the 2005 Wellcome Trust summer school on ELSI and the neurosciences.
Ana Rosa Tenório de Amorim I am a Brazilian LLM student and law teacher interested in neuroscience, neurophilosophy, neuroethics and law. In Brazil, neuroscience and law field is not very developed and even in USA and Europe such approach is unusual. Right now, I am preparing an article about neuroethics and human rights law and another one introducing neuroscience and law relation to Brazilian legal community. However, I believe there are so many others connections: social cognitive neuroscience, moral and decisions issues, neurosciences influences on free will and politics, and so on, can affect law theory and practice. As I am in the beginning of my studies, I would like to hear from everyone who can present a link between neuroscience and human science.
Ditte Rose Andersen Psychologist working in field of special education and wishing to develop further the subjects and themes of my master’s thesis through qualitative research. In my thesis I look at the conceptualization of cognitive disturbances in autism through an optics of non-positivist social psychology, mainly critical psychology and poststructuralist and social constructionist sociological and psychological disability studies. Taking its starting point within these social psychological traditions, my thesis deals with the possibility of exploring autistic subjectivity within and beyond the ruling paradigm of autism as mental disability, affecting natural cognitive capabilities (Theory of Mind, Executive Functions and Central Coherence). Linking said natural functions to practice and discourse within societal institutions, especially education (mainstream and special), it is argued that a contextual and discursive understanding of both autism and autistic subjects is needed and that the current ontology of autism (embedded in scientific and interventional understandings) leads to restrictive agency for autistic subjects.
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Andy Balmer I’m presently a PhD student at ISS working on the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and its development as a lie detector. I’m generally interested in applying post-structural and social theories to the findings of neuroscience research.
Michael Barr My current research interests include psychiatric ethics, especially the diagnosis and treatment of depression and personality disorders, theories of informed consent in relation to genetic information, and the philosophical uses of the history of biomedical ethics. I earned my PhD from the University of Durham whilst working as a research associate in the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Institute at the University of Newcastle.
Rachel Bell
Phil Bielby My background is in bioethics and law. I am interested in competence to consent to biomedical (particularly psychiatric) research with ‘cognitively vulnerable’ participants whose decisional competence is questionable but not necessarily absent. My PhD thesis developed a normative framework for making judgments about decisional competence in this context. This stimulated my interest in the ethics of neuroscience, which is developing along three lines. First, I am concerned with the ethical and legal issues surrounding the participation of individuals with mental disorder in types of research made possible by recent advances in neuroscience. Second, I am exploring how new technologies can and should be used to identify and treat mental disorder and how the law may evolve so as to respond to these challenges in an ethically defensible way. Third, I am researching the insights that neuroscience offers to understanding the nature of competence to consent, especially the role of the emotions in decisional competence. I am currently completing a monograph for Springer based on my doctoral work.
John Bone For a few years now I have been working on a theoretical framework that integrates social theory with an understanding of human beings informed by developments in neuroscience, emerging from the ‘decade of the brain’. The resulting model acknowledges that society, and the individuals who comprise it, are products of a dialectical process of ‘co-construction’ between brain and social experience. Thus, it is recognised that social processes (at both the micro and macro level) are mediated and ‘structured’ by the inherent cognitive and emotional capacities shared by all human beings, and that individual brain development is reciprocally responsive to ongoing social experience. The model proposes various ways in which key social phenomena can be more clearly understood by going beyond conventional social theory and adopting such a perspective. An outline, ‘The Social Map and the Problem of Order’, has been published in Theory and Science 6:1 (2005), while a revised version is applied to understanding issues of national and cultural identity in ‘The Social Map: Cohesion, Conflict & National Identity, published in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 12:3-4 (2006). For anyone who might be interested both articles are available online. CLuciana Caliman I did a Master’s thesis on “genealogies of biopower” in the work of Michel Foucault. My doctoral dissertation examines the emergence of the “inattentive individual” as a type of subject constructed within an interdisciplinary network during the second half of the 19th century. I am interested specifically on the emergence of the ADHD, or “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” diagnosis in the second half of the 20th century. I want to investigate two main aspects: (1) how the diagnosis as a nosographical concept is connected with the social and individual experience of the illness in the context of a more global process of biomedicalisation of behavior and identity (a process that includes the development of genetic and neurochemical selfhood); (2) how ADHD functions as an “epistemic thing” elaborated in clinical and other settings.
Dr Felicity Callard Tim Calton I have recently completed both a research fellowship on a study examining risk factors for adolescent onset schizophrenia using fMRI and EEG technologies, as well as a Master's thesis examining the dominance of reductionist and materialist epistemologies within international schizophrenia research over the last twenty years. I am fascinated by psychiatry's at times ambivalent realtionship with the humanities and have a particular interest in philosophy (especially the philosophy of consciousness). I am concerned by the tendency within schizophrenia research (and possibly psychiatry as a whole) to reify and fetishise technology, and perceive a disturbing tendency to use this to obviate the wider interpersonal and social contexts informing 'mental illness'. I'm pursuing several research strands at the interface between the humanities and mental health (see link below) and am very keen to link up with anyone else entraining work in this area.
Andrea Cerroni Physicist as background, I am a sociologist of science interested in new technologies, especially in the NBIC Convergence, both for cultural (ethical and cognitive) aspects and governance issues there involved. In particular, I have been working on scientific discovery, science communication, public perception of biotechnology, knowledge-society foundations. I am also the Italian National Delegate in the Programme Committee “Science in Society”, European FP7, and interested in the whole subject area.
Suparna Choudhury Research Scholar I have a background in developmental social cognitive neuroscience and transcultural psychiatry. Currently, I am working on an ethnographic and historical study of the neuroscience of adolescent behaviour. I am also involved in developing the project of Critical Neuroscience, which examines the social and cultural contexts of questions in neuroscience research and finds ways to link these analyses to experimental practice. BIOS Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science
c.m.connors@lse.ac.ukhttp://personal.lse.ac.uk/connorsc/ I currently serve as the Programme Coordinator of the European Neuroscience and Society Network (ENSN), and also work alongside Dr Ilina Singh on the Wellcome Trust funded VOICES project. The aim of this research is to bring the perspectives and experiences of children into international debates around rising child psychiatric diagnoses and the increasing use of drugs in child psychiatry. Prior to my arrival at LSE, I spent two years as an fMRI researcher at the Yale Child Study Clinic, where I worked with Dr. Robert Schultz on studies of social processing in autistic and typically developing children. I completed my MSc at the BIOS Centre in 2008.
John Cromby I have begun using elements of neuroscience in conjunction with other resources (phenomenology, social theory, constructionist psychology, the psychology of emotion) to theorise aspects of subjectivity, and am currently interested in feelings as an analytic category by which to understand the body’s dynamic influence. Recently I have been applying this blend of resources in attempts to develop my understanding of forms of mental distress. I am interested in further developing these ideas; applying them to other substantive foci; and developing suitable methods to enable the integrative study of embodied subjectivity as an open-system co-constituted by society and culture.
DTrudy Dehue Trudy Dehue chairs a research group in the history/ sociology/ philosophy of psychology at the University of Groningen. Her own work focusses on the human sciences from an STS perspective. Early 2008, her book will appear on the question of why clinical depression has increased in the developed western world. Using the Netherlands as its main example, this book analyses and rejects three common explanations of ‘the depression epidemic’. In doing so, it develops a thoroughly nominalistic view of the word ‘depression’ and of psychiatric science generally. Next, it offers a fourth explanation of the massive combat of depression in affluent countries, arguing that since the 1990s the word depression has acquired yet an extra meaning. She also published the book Changing the Rules with Cambridge University Press (1995) about the historical development of methodological paradigms in psychology. And she published widely on the history and assumptions of the randomized controlled trial (RCT) including RCT’s testing the effects of heroin-provision to ‘incurable’ heroin users.
Dr Gerardo del Cerro
Natasha Dow Schüll Our project is a study of the knowledge practices, circuits of intellectual exchange, and cultural values at play in the emerging field of “neuroeconomics.” Neuroeconomics is an burgeoning scientific field that marries brain imaging technologies to the theoretical problem set of economics. The field entails a double movement whereby economic behavior is biologized and biological processes are made economic. Neuroscientists are using economic tools--games--to probe social phenomena such as social influence, love, and trust, which are understood as functions of evaluative computation unfolding along the neural circuitry of the brain. Societies, in turn, are understood as collections of individuals acting according to their internal valuation of events, goods, services. The ultimate aim of the field, as one researcher put it, is to understand the pathways that run "from synapse to society." Our analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which notions of individual freedom of choice at stake in the contemporary neoliberal world enter into the research questions and experiments of neuroeconomists, how these notions are transformed as they are incorporated into the models of individual and society that these scientists are producing, and how they loop back into public debate.
Val Dusek I am interested in research on cerebral lateralization, anatomical and brain imaging studies particularly with respect to sex differences. I am interested in the degree of bias and presupposition involved in both scientific conclusions and media popularization of this research. I am also interested in the use of appeals to neurophysiology in recent educational literature, such as so-called "brain-based learning," particularly with respect to the issue of whether appeals to neurophysiology in this area are crude rationalizations for older, non-neurophysiological conceptions in education involving romanicism vs. rationalism. FMartha J. Farah I am a cognitive neuroscientist, and old enough to remember when cognitive psychologists were taught that the brain was irrelevant for understanding the mind! The spectacular success of cognitive neuroscience over the last three decades has shown us how wrong that belief was. It has also given us many new methods for understanding and manipulating the human mind and brain, which have potential real-world applications. For this reason, I have been very interested in neuroethics for the past several years. I am delighted to discover this network of people with similar interests!
Des Fitzgerald Christina Fradelos I am interested in how the recent advent of brain-imaging technologies has influenced the way both neuroscientists and popular readerships conceptualize the brain and how this differs from or resembles past conceptions. Specifically, I am interested in why localization theory of the brain has regained its strength alongside these technologies over the last half century and whether the growing criticism that contemporary neuroscience is a resurrected phrenology holds any value for future neuroscientific research. Dr. Scott Fruehwald Law & Behavioral Biology; Neurojurisprudence. I have published articles on biology and constitutional law, contracts, and rights. I also have a website on Neurojurisprudence at sfruehwald.com. GDouglas Galbi Gaining from neuroscience insights into the biology of communication and the demand for communication services, particularly with respect to different sensory forms, e.g. camera phones, text messaging, virtual world participation.
Paula Gardner As a Communication and Media Studies Professor, my research focuses on the visual and textual discourses of broad spectrum diagnoses as they are marketed, promoted and circulated through culture in North America. I am particularly interested in the interstices of NGO, government policy and industry discourses as they overlap and diverge, their neoliberalist and consumer capitalist assumptions, and resulting new biosubjectivities. As well, my research addresses how deregulated new media sites and technologies encourage new recovery subjects and biopower practices.
Dr. Ulas Gezgin Dr. Ulas Basar Gezgin, PhD, who teaches economics at the Vietnam campus of an Australian university, was born at Istanbul in 1978. After Darussafaka High School, he earned B.A. degree (2000) and M.A. degree (2002) from Bogazici University. After his training in ‘psychology’, he taught at the Prince School at Thailand Kingdom as a science teacher. He has received his PhD degree in cognitive sciences at Informatics Institute, Middle East Technical University (Sept. 2003- May 2006) by his dissertation entitled ‘Relationship of Bodily Communication with Cognitive and Personality Variables’. He has also pursued another PhD degree in anthropology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at University of Canterbury, New Zealand as a researcher awarded with Postgraduate Scholarship. His works in various genres and areas have been published in artistic and scientific journals and magazines as well as newspapers. He continues to contemplate on the issues of the notion of information society and the world citizenship. After 2 years working as a research assistant at Bogazici University (2000-2002), he has taught courses on ‘psychology’, anthropology, linguistics and cognitive sciences at various universities. His first published book is the poetry-in-prose book ‘Eagle or Sun?’ which he had translated from Spanish (Octavio Paz, Istanbul: Virtuel Yayinlari, 2000).
Janice Graham I am a medical anthropologist interested in science studies, technology assessment and a global bioethics concerned with inequities and power relationships. Challenges of safety, effectiveness, standardization, risk, and trust figure prominently in my mapping of biotechnological actors. My work in dementia diagnostics and the treatment for Alzheimer’s disease examines the moral basis of profit when disease is defined as a market opportunity. I study safety and efficacy in the regulation of emerging biotherapeutics and how the practices of scientists, clinicians, industry, government and patients construct and interpret evidence to arrive at regulatory decisions. I held a postdoctoral fellowship in geriatric medicine and neuroepidemiology, an endowed Research Chair in Medical Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator award. A co-edited book (with Peter Stephenson) “Aging and Loss: Contesting the Dominant Paradigm” will be published by the University of Toronto Press in 2009. Forthcoming research explores the development, technology transfer and introduction of a conjugate vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa. Samuel H. Greenblatt My main interests are in the history of the neurosciences in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of my publications have dealt with the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) and the American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing (1869-1939). Since I recently retired from all clinical practice, I have started work on my long delayed monograph about “John Hughlings Jackson and the Development of the Neurosciences.” One of my historiographic aims is to explore the following question: Can historical analysis of neuroscientific paradigms help to identify unstated assumptions in the paradigms? If so, can the paradigm (theory) be improved by analysis of the constraints that the unstated assumptions place on it? Put simply, can history assist in advancing science?
Sky Gross I am currently a post-doctoral fellow at the dpt. of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv university, and future fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation in Jerusalem. Among my fields of study and interest are the historical and contemporary social phenomena associated with the mind body problem and the so-called irreducibility of mind; The cultural correlates of neuroanatomical research and brain localization (how is culture mapped onto the brain); Epistemologies of the self as associated with mind/brain - e.g. through imaging technologies (co-editing a book on the subject with a colleague from Cal-tech), in clinical diagnosis (I've conducted an extensive fieldwork in a neurooncology clinic), in interdisciplinary exchanges (I am currently working on a discourse analysis of recorded exchanges within a neuroscientists-social scientists research group), in body and embodiment in neurosurgical settings (based on fieldwork in the operating room). I have also written on representations of mind and brain around psychiatric treatments (organic and dynamic, psychopharmacology, ECT, but more particularly - psychosurgery).
HAnne Harrington My interests span the wide range of sciences that take the human mind – and human beings – as their subject matter. In this sense, I am interested in the neurosciences as one of the most intellectually and culturally influential of those sciences, but equally interested in how neuroscientific visions of the human mind interact with approaches in psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, and experimental psychology. More broadly, I am among those scholars who are seeking to take the measure and gauge the influence of what some are calling the rise in our time of a new “neurological society,” and how its agendas relate to or are challenged by ongoing humanistic projects in our society. Thus, I am interested in first person narratives of brain disorder, in such intellectually disquieting phenomena as the placebo effect, and in semi-maverick efforts to construct a science of the mind on a non-reductionist basis: the holistic neurology of early 20th-century Germany, for example, and the mind-body medicine of late 20th-century America.
IJudy Illes Judy Illes is Professor of Neurology and Canada Research Chair in Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Dr. Illes directs the National Core for Neuroethics at UBC and a research team devoted to ethical, legal, social and policy challenges specifically at the intersection of the neurosciences and biomedical ethics. These include advances in functional neuroimaging in basic and clinical research, commercialization of cognitive neuroscience, clinical findings detected incidentally in research, regenerative medicine, and stakeholder engagement on a global scale. Dr. Illes has written numerous books, edited volumes and articles. Her latest book, Neuroethics: Defining the Issues in Theory, Practice and Policy, was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. Dr. Illes is a member of the Internal Advisory Board for the Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction (INMHA) of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Institute of Medicine, Forum on Neuroscience on Neurological Disorders, a the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, and co-Chair of the Committee on Women in Neuroscience for the Society for Neuroscience. KGuy Kahane
My dissertation project is about brain research and gender. Central to my work is the issue of how gender is treated in fMRI language studies, i.e. in studies that look at how human (specifically, male and female) language is processed in the brain. My hypothesis is that gender comparisons in such studies involve methods that inherently lead to gender differences. In other words, many of the gender differences found are rooted in the methods rather than due to gender. While in neuroscience gender is a hard variable, in gender studies gender is a social phenomenon, a result and a facet of human action and social structures – in short: a social construct. My aim is to bridge the divide between these two epistemologically different approaches. This goal shall be achieved in three steps: First, I analyze the conditions, under which the fMRI language studies were performed, with regard to gender. Secondly, the concepts of materiality and body applied in deconstructionist gender studies are examined. Thirdly, I will consider neuroscience as part of bioscience, biomedicine and biotechnology.
Dr. Machiel Keestra Currently my research focuses on human action, from a variety of perspectives. Having written on language and human action in a.o. Aristotle and Hegel, and on
Julie Kent My research interests are around the emergence of innovative health technologies and especially tissue and cell based technologies. I have been researching the collection and use of aborted fetal tissue as a source of stem cells which has led to investigation of the history of fetal tissue transplantation in neuroscience and current applications of stem cell technology for the treatment of neurological disorders. This work focuses on ethical, social and regulatory issues relating to fetal tissue and neural stem cell use.
P. Klaassen
Alison Kraft A life sciences graduate and historian of biology, much of my research has, in broad terms, been concerned to understand the emergence of new medical technologies – including nuclear medicine, pharmaceuticals and, more recently, various forms of stem cell innovation – and how they shape and impact clinical practice. My current interest in the neurosciences centres on new and emerging understandings of brain function, and in particular on the development/use of (neuroimaging) biomarkers to diagnose behavioural disorders/’mental illness’.
LAndrew Lakoff I’ve done research on a number of themes at the intersection of the epistemology of the human sciences, recent developments in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and global pharmaceutical circulation. I’m especially interested in the relation between new technologies of behavioural intervention and expert understandings of the human.
Clauss Lamm Social Neuroscience - empathy and prosocial behavior; cooperation and competition Decision Making methods of human brain research.
Richard Langlais I am working on several science and technology studies projects dealing with the transformation of science when subjected to changes in institutional contexts, with focuses on functional proteomics and the development of the field of social neuroscience. Particular questions have to do with 1) the way that inter- and transdisciplinarity are being attempted 2) how the value of scientific production becomes embedded in user contexts, as it moves from academia into commercialization, and 3) the specific images of society that are claimed in social neuroscience, and 4) the development of social neuroscience in the Nordic countries.
Nicolas Langlitz I studied medicine and philosophy in Berlin and wrote a book about the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s practice of variable-length sessions. My Ph.D. thesis in Medical Anthropology entitled "Neuropsychedelia. The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain" examines the uses of hallucinogenic drugs in contemporary neuropsychopharmacology in Switzerland and the United States. My new project is an ethnographic and historical investigation of collaborations between neuroscientists and philosophers, especially in the field of dream research. Mr Vic LanserIndependent viclanser@yahoo.co.uk After working in the sociologies of medicine and education in the 1970s including a spell at the OECD I am a retired financial journalist who is free to ponder the many intellectual ramifications of the diagnosis ADHD, from not only the canon of sociological theory but from perspectives embracing Foucault, Lacan and recent ideas about governmentality and “freedom” etc. Clement Levallois I am an economist by training, with a PhD (2008) in history of economic thought on the relationships between economics and biology in post-war USA. As a post-doc recruited jointly by a neuroeconomics lab and a research institute in innovative social science and humanities, my current research is now focused on the (very recent) history of neuroeconomics, around three main research questions: the functioning of interdisciplinarity in neuroeconomics labs; the study of neuroeconomics as an emerging scientific community; and popularization of neuroeconomics in relation with neuromarketing. My research methods include text analysis, interviews and field visits (at Duke University), a global online survey (www.neurosurvey.net), social network analysis and bibliometrics, and the building of Internet databases and datamining. Irregular updates on my work and thoughts on the topic can be found here.
Dr. Melissa Littlefield My research broadly focuses on the intersections between science, literature, technology, and culture; more specifically, I am interested in the cultural histories of and intersections between the neurosciences, psychology, the forensic sciences and culture as they pertain to deception detection in the long twentieth century. Current projects include a book manuscript on the cultural history of deception detection, a book project on metadisciplinarity, and several short pieces on topics such as the CSI: Effect, boundary work in the forensic sciences, and the neuroscience of science fiction's future justice systems. Publications can be found in Science, Technology & Human Values (May 2009), Neurology and Modernity (eds. Andrew Shail and Laura Salisbury, forthcoming from Palgrave in 2009), Feminist Theory: Special Issue on Feminist Theory and/of Science (2004). I was a participant in the ENSN mini-neuroschool in Vienna (2009).
Margaret Lock I am currently investigating how molecular and population genetics and genomics are being newly conceptualized and researched, with emphasis on the emerging discipline of epigenetics. Central to the project is documentation of the implications of this new found knowledge for professional and popular understanding of normal and abnormal conditions; the concept of risk and its application in everyday life; transcendence of nature/nurture debates, and for the potential "enhancement" of individuals and society. My focus is on dementia, Alzheimer's Disease, mild cognitive impairment, and psychiatric disorder, and emphasis is given to the transfer of knowledge across domains of activity including the basic sciences, clinical practice, advocacy groups, the media, patients, families, and the public.
Dr. Marjorie Lorch Marjorie Perlman Lorch is Reader in Brain and Language at Birkbeck College, University of London where she has been based for 20 years. She received her Ph.D. in Neurolinguistics from Boston University in 1985. Her research interests include clinical, experimental and theoretical explorations of the neurological instantiation of human communication. She has worked with a variety of adult and developmental neurological disorders exploring language, emotion and movement. Her current research also includes work on the 19th century history of ideas in the neurosciences.
Gesa Lindemann I am interested in the scientific construction of the elementary borders of the human. Concerning these borders the brain is the most crucial organ. My first post doc research was on the biomedical construction of life and death. The analysis was based on an ethnography in intensive care units. The focus was on the establishment of the brain death diagnosis. My actual project is: “Consciousness and the anthropological difference”. It includes an ethnography of neurobiological experimentation in animals and human persons. The question is: How is the difference constructed between a simple animal organism and a human person, and which part does the brain play within this process. Such questions challenge the traditional framework of sociological theory and methodology. Therefore I work on epistemological, theoretical, and methodological questions as well. In these terms my work refers to the tradition of German philosophical anthropology, especially on the work of Helmuth Plessner. This perspective transcends the limits of traditional sociological analysis as well as the limits of a Foucaultian or Latourian analysis.
MRobin Mackenzie Lambros Malafouris The focus of my research lies at the interface between cognition and material culture. For the last few years I am working on the Material Engagement approach to the study of mind and the archaeology of extended and distributed cognition. I am interested in the cognitive life of things and the role of material culture in social intelligence especially with reference to animacy, intentionality, Theory of Mind (ToM), agency and the body schema. Currently I am concerned, from a neuroanthropological perspective, with the possible ways that the information of the ‘neuroimage’ can be effectively embedded, understood and utilized within the wider context of non-biological props, scaffolds and artificial prostheses that delineate the socio-technical boundaries of the human cognitive map. Edward Manier I have worked on patterns of communication linking neuroscientists and psychologists, specifically on neurobiological and psychological models of the associative learning process (Eric Kandel, Robert Rescorla). I am currently at work on the interaction of evolutionary, neurobiological and psychosocial models of and treatments for drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, and in the study of parent-child and adult attachment, and human sex and gender differences. Uri Maoz After finishing a PhD focusing on computational motor control at the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I now carry out post-doctoral research at the Weizmann Institute of Science. We focus on emotive and artistic human motion. Moreover, I lead a research group at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute that focuses on “Neuroscience and Society”. Composed of young neuroscientists, philosophers and social scientists, the group discusses various aspects of the implications of neuroscience on society. Daniel Margulies Svenja Matusall After working on ADHD and infant enhancement, in my doctoral thesis I am focussing on the cultural history of the brain in autumn 2007. My focus is on the location of emotions in the brain and the impact of different concepts of the brain on the notion of the self. My aim is to show how neuroscientific knowledge influences social and cultural perceptions of human beings and how social and cultural knowledge again influences the perception of the brain. My main question is why certain notions of the brain are dominant in certain eras and how they are situated in the social, cultural, political and economical context of their times. I analyse three narratives of 20th century’s brain science – the holistic brain, the cybernetic brain, and the enhanced (enhanceable) brain – and investigate continuities and discontinuities between the three of them. Linsey McGoey My research is focused on the governance and regulation of psychopharmaceuticals, and on the uses of “strategic ignorance” among government regulators, policymakers and patients in arbitrating claims over the effectiveness and safety of drugs. After completing my PhD at the LSE’s BIOS Centre, I took up an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment. I am interested in the profitability of ignorance and uncertainty in consolidating expert status, and in the political economy of ignorance in general. My current research is focused on exploring how industry and regulatory groups exploit scientific uncertainty for material gain or reputational advancement, with a particular focus on the structure and governance on the pharmaceutical and neurotech industries. Maurizio Meloni After his PhD in Italy in 2004, Maurizio Meloni has been awarded several postdoctoral fellowships, both European (DAAD, OEAD, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, ESF-ENSN at BIOS LSE) and American (Fulbright Research Scholar at the Univ. of Chicago). He is the author of one book in Italian on Freud and Philosophy (L’orecchio di Freud. Società della comunicazione e pensiero affettivo, Bari 2005), and is currently working on a second book, in English, on Naturalism and Modernity, where naturalism is interpreted less as an epistemological standpoint, as customarily happens in the academic debate in philosophy, and more as a global way of rethinking humanness. He has written and published on topics such as René Girard and psychoanalysis, Freud and cognitivism, Antonio Gramsci and psychoanalysis, Naturalism and antinaturalism in contemporary philosophy, and in intellectual history. He is at present a visiting scholar at the Bios Centre-LSE with a grant of the European Neuroscience and Society Network/ESF on the topic: “Resisting the Brain: Philosophers in the Forefront of Neurobiological Skepticism.” From 2005, he has contributed at the Department of Philosophy and Epistemology, Chair in Philosophy of History, University of Rome 1. Maurizio’s main interest about neuroscience regards the brain as a site where the clash between a naturalistic and an antinaturalistic paradigm in intellectual history is today being re-enacted. From the standpoint of Continental philosophy in particular, he is interested in mapping points of resistances to the current cerebralization of the human experience.
Andy Miah I am interested in the links between philosophy and cultural theory in the study of human enhancement technologies. Most of my work has examined gene transfer, though I have published on philosophy of mind and the prospect of
Natasha Mitchell I’m a science broadcaster and journalist (with original academic qualifications in engineering), and host a national weekly radio program in Australia called “All in the Mind” which explores the mind, brain and human behaviour in interdisciplinary and eclectic ways. The program (also broadcast internationally) engages with thinkers in the fields of psychiatry, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, popular culture, history and beyond. I’m especially interested in the emerging realm of neuroethics, to the point where it might just lure me back into further graduate studies. I am, however, also interested in the many public policy and journalistic discussions that will necessarily be inspired by research in neuroethics. In 2005-6, I am based in Boston on a fellowship at MIT, which offers time to explore some of these interests amongst others. Zahra Moradi
NSaskia K. Nagel Having an educational background in cognitive science, with a focus on neuroscience, and in philosophy, with a focus on philosophy of mind and ethics, I stay in both fields during my PhD: While I do empirical work (mainly EEG) in the neurosciences, my parallel interest for my thesis is in “neuroethics”: I’ d like to better understand how progress in the neurosciences affects the way we understand ourselves - as individuals, as society, and as species. I discuss issues like enhancement, concepts of health, disease, normality, nature, privacy, among others, always trying to follow a pragmatist approach that allows the consideration of the particular context for moral/political/social/legal deliberation. Also, I am aware of the responsibility of neuroscientists to communicate and discuss their work with other scientists and the public. Furthermore, I am interested in metaethical questions.
OGary Olson One of my current research interests is exploring the possibly profound political implications of new research in the neural architecture of the brain showing that human are hard-wired for empathy. Which variables best explain the glaring disjuncture between this moral predisposition and the almost pathological empathy deficit existing in U.S. (but not only) society?
Francisco Ortega
PBernike Pasveer I’m interested in the (ethnographic) study and conceptualization of how technologies affect or equip the human body and its abilities, characteristics, experiences, etcetera. I have studied the involvement of x-ray technology with ontologies and practices of disease, so called ‘natural’ childbirth, reproductive technologies. I also study elite sport i.c. top-class speedskating: how is talent done there, and how do athletes’ bodies learn to move? Concerning neuroscience and given its ambition to cover all that drives us under the umbrella of what the discipline and its exciting technologies can visualize and explain, I am particularly interested in studying and articulating the multiple existences and functions of ‘brain’, both in terms of geography/culture and in terms of scientific disciplines.
Martyn Pickersgill Situated within science and technology studies (STS), my interests concern the sociology of biomedicine. To date, my work has focussed on the history and sociology of psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience. My doctoral studies concerned the sociotechnical emergence, shaping and governance of antisocial personality disorder, and my current ESRC-funded research examines the social and ethical dimensions of contemporary neuroscience. QREric Racine I am a Canadian bioethicist whose main research interests are in the area of neuroethics and the social studies of neuroscience. The activities of the Neuroethics Research Unit bear on diverse challenges in neurological and psychiatric care such as favoring patient autonomy, diminishing stigma, and promoting respectful healthcare services. My research program aims at bridging these various challenges to identify practical solutions and explore emerging conceptual issues in neuroscience.
Nicole Rafter I am working on a social history of biological theories of crime, a study that intersects with the history of the neurosciences.
Lynette Reid With abiding research interests in the social contextualization of the mind, its capacities and functions (shaped early by Wittgenstein and later by feminist philosophical psychology and bioethics, in a more postmodern direction), I am currently employed by and co-investigator on a “neuoethics” grant examining issues in research ethics in early clinical trials in brain interventions, particularly examining justifications that are employed and questions that arise where prospective research participants have few or no treatment options and/or have fatal diagnoses (case studies: current gene transfer for Glioblastoma Multiforme; proposed stem cell transplantation for Parkinson’s Disease).
Sarah de Rijcke In traditional history of medicine the human brain is generally considered as a ‘given’, visually represented in a variety of ways, following the development of novel graphic techniques and conventions. From this perspective visual representations of the brain are more or less ‘accurate’ or ‘truthful’, taking the current state of neurological knowledge as a standard. My thesis consistently shifts attention to the contemporary practices in which these representations were used and produced. Rather than accepting the human brain as a ‘given’, the project aims at exploring the thesis that this diversity of contexts, along with novel techniques and conventions, has produced a variety of brains. Theoretical framework: studies on changing notions of objectivity and (historical variation in) the boundaries between science, art, technology and society.
My interests include the Anthropology of Neuroscience and Medical Anthropology. Presently, my specific research question is about how neuroscience conceptualizes moral decision-making and the nature and politics of a mathematically imagined morality. I have related interests in the emerging connections between evolving biomedical paradigms and global conceptualizations about the individual. My areas of research include global biopsychiatry, psychopharmaceuticalization, science studies, religion, linguistics and ethics. My clinical experience includes work with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Columbia University’s School of Public Health and Northwestern University’s School of Medicine. I hold a presidential fellowship at Princeton and was a former Galbraith Scholar at Harvard. I am presently on faculty at Benedictine University.
Nikolas Rose My current research concerns biological and genetic psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience, and its social, ethical, cultural and legal implications. This research focuses on the political, social and ethical implications of recent developments in the life sciences, notably molecular genetics, neuroscience and psycho-pharmacology. In particular I am looking at the way in which new styles of thought about brains and selves change our ideas about normality and abnormality, abut the distinction between cure and enhancement, and indeed about the borderlines between illness and health. Linked to this, I argue that we are seeing the emergence of novel ways for the government of human mental life and conduct. I do not see this as the rise of a new biological and genetic determinism, but argue that we are seeing a mutation in biopolitics, the rise of bioeconomics, and the emergence of an innovative new ethics of biological citizenship and genetic responsibility.
SJulian Savulescu Christian von Scheve
Stephan Schleim Sigrid Schmitz Currently, I focus my research on neuro-technologies, on the question of human-machine-communication in particular. What are the „data“, what are the codes centred in these forms of communication? The rational bodybrain is to intra-act with the mathematical-logical machine. This concept focuses particular aspects of thinking while ignoring others. One question is, whether in BMI as future vision of the technological human the classical separation in a male connoted rationality, as „pride of creation“, against a female connoted emotionality/intuition, as accessory at the best, becomes (again) manifest. Last but not least, which obstinacy do the intra-actors themselves develop throughout and within their mutual relationships of communication? Is it possible to get in touch with these obstinacies via ''mistakes'' or ''failures'' in this area of development?
Tanja Schneider
Kristjan Sigurdson My research focuses on discourse analysis of neuropsychologist talk about animal models of mental disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy.
Chloe Silverman My research focuses on the role of affect in biomedical knowledge, and in the selective erasure of affect in the production of forms of biomedical rationality. I am currently completing a manuscript on the history of the diagnostic category of autism spectrum disorders. My focus is on the emergence of parent advocacy groups devoted to altering the authoritative description of autism as a lifelong neurological condition, in order to make room for treatment and the possibility of multiple aetiologies. My next project concerns the production of measurable forms of cognitive difference through psychometric testing techniques, and the ways that these techniques are put to use in research, education, and the formation of patient communities.
Estrid Sørensen MA in social psychology, Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Copenhagen. My current research concerns the protection of minors from harmful content in new media (computer games, Internet, mobile phones). I study how regulation of media is done in various sites in society. One of these sites is neuroscience. Here, dopamine has been related to addiction of computer game playing, and recently also to Internet addiction, just as it has been claimed that increase in the release of dopamine due to excess computer game playing may cause psychotic conditions, similar to those known in schizophrenic patients. My interest is how scientific knowledge generated in the neuroscience is transmitted to policy debates concerning computer game regulation, and how this knowledge is translated when undergoing this movement. Neil R. Smalheiser John Sutton I work on interdisciplinarity in the sciences of memory, searching for integrative approaches to the problem of whether there’s any sense in which memory theorists across the daunting diversity of disciplines and levels – from neurobiology to narrative theory, from the computational to the cross-cultural and the developmental to the postcolonial – are studying the same phenomena: specific areas include reduction and levels of explanation in the neurosciences and psychological disciplines; memory and distributed/ situated cognition; memory in the philosophy of the social sciences; material agency and exograms. I’m currently looking for ways, from phenomenology to neuroscience, to study interactions between autobiographical memory and habitual or skilled embodied/ procedural memory in skilled performance such as sports (cricket batting), dance, and yoga. Other interests include the history of the neurosciences (especially animal spirits) and psychology; Descartes; dreaming; cognition and culture.
TDimitar Tomov The title of my DSc thesis to be finalized soon is the following: Institutionalization of memory research - historiographic and scientometric aspects. I am interested in the dynamic interdisciplinary international scientific communications in this field. This very narrow topic of modern neurosciences deserves a particular attention to be paid by specialists not only in biomedicine and clinical medicine but also in sociology, behaviour sciences and a lot of other rapidly advancing disciplines facing through a more effective international collaboration the requirements of the knowledge-based society of the present millennium. VFernando Vidal As far as neuroscience and society is concerned, I am interested in how we became our brains. More precisely, approaching this topic in the perspective of the “longue durée” of the Christian tradition, I look at the history of what I’ve called “brainhood” (the quality or property of being a brain) and the “cerebral subject” an anthropological figure with manifold cultural forms and inscriptions, according to which the only part of the body necessary for human personhood and personal identity is one’s own brain, or its functional equivalent.
Scott Vrecko I’m interested in the social and political implications of biological psychiatry, and in how the new brain sciences are transforming understandings and experiences of mental health and illness. I’m particularly interested in the social, political, and commercial contexts in which psychopharmaceuticals are produced, marketed, and consumed. My doctoral research investigated these themes in relation to neuroscience models of (and 'brain-targeting' treatments for) addiction and craving. As a postdoctoral fellow, I am continuing to investigate anti-craving medications (especially in relation to their use in managing compulsive desires for food and behavioural addictions), and am also embarking on a three-year project investigating the development and use of medications for the enhancement of cognition and memory.
WAyo Wahlberg Through my doctoral and ongoing research I have investigated how claims and accounts of efficacy achieve plausibility within the field of herbal medicine in particular. I have in particular been interested in how efficacy is measured or audited (increasingly through clinical trials) on the one hand, and pre-clinically (in)validated (through pharmacological mechanism of action research) on the other. I am currently looking at how 'quality of life' - understood as phenomenological rather than biological life - has emerged as a key therapeutic object. Through this work I hope to explore some of the tensions that persist between biological accounts of therapeutic efficacy realised through pharmacological research and phenomenological measurement of efficacy realised with the help of rating scales which are used to capture the intensity of certain conditions.
Steven Wainwright My major substantive research interest is in the topics of organ transplantation, intensive care medicine and stem cell biology, which are three of the defining areas of innovative medical technologies. These three biomedical realms require extensive collaboration between scientists and clinicians, making them particularly interesting fields for social research as they enable the fusion of science and technology studies (STS) with medical sociology. The main focus of my research is ethnographic studies of the body, and I am currently a full-time researcher on a project that is exploring ‘stem cell innovation in action’, especially in the fields of islet cell and liver cell transplantation, but also on the prospects for stem cell therapies for the neurosciences (particularly Parkinson’s Disease).
Arno Wouters
Simon J. Williams My background is in medical sociology, sociology of the body and the sociology of emotions. My recent work has been on the biopolitics of sleep and wakefulness, including an ESRC seminar series ‘Sleep and Society’ (now completed (http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/sleepandsociety). I am currently researching the new wakefulness promoting agent (‘smart’ drug) Modafinil and am lead editor on a forthcoming monograph (for the journal Sociology of Health and Illness) on ‘Pharmaceuticals and Society: Critical Discourses and Debates. I also have broader research interests in: (i) the social, ethical and political implications of developments in neuroscience/neurotechnology, particularly in relation to psychopharmaceuticals; (ii) the social construction of neuroscience/neurotechnology in professional and popular culture; (iii) the public understanding of neuroscience, and: (iv) the military and security uses of neuroscience/neurotechnology.
Elizabeth A. Wilson My research argues for a synthesis between feminist theory and the neurosciences. There is a growing awareness in feminist scholarship that the gap between feminist theories of embodiment, subjectivity and identity, on the one hand, and biological data, on the other, needs to be bridged. My work shows how the neurosciences have the potential to effect significant, innovative transformations of feminist theory. This research has recently been published as Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Duke University Press, 2004). My current project explores how our bodies are implicated in the epidemic of depression that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on feminist theory, psychodynamic research and neurobiological data about depression (especially in relation to the peripheral nervous system), this project investigates the kinds of embodiment that are being produced by endemic melancholia. The project aims to deepen the feminist reach into the biological body and expand the affective profile through which feminists have analysed depression. |
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