<nettime-ann> Neuro-Reality Check -- Scrutinizing the ‘neuro-turn’ in the humanities and natural sciences (Berlin)

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

.
Conference, December 1-3, 2011

Neuro-Reality Check.
Scrutinizing the ‘neuro-turn’ in the humanities and natural sciences.

Workshop at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science,  
Berlin. December, 1-3 2011

organized by Suparna Choudhury and Max Stadler

with contributions from Nima Bassiri, Stephen Casper, Roger Cooter,  
Steven Fuller, Sky Gross, Clement Levallois, Melissa Littlefield,  
Daniel Margulies, Paul Martin and Simon Williams, Constantina  
Papoulias and Felicity Callard, Martyn Pickersgill, Amir Raz, Mark  
Robinson, Julia Voss and Niklas Maak, and Allan Young. The full  
programme can be found online.

Today, few developments in the world of science and technology would  
seem to draw comparable degrees of attention, commentary and sheer  
excitement than the neurosciences. Within and beyond academia it has  
become routine to celebrate or alternatively, to castigate, the  
purportedly palpable effects and consequences – social, political,  
cultural and intellectual - of the recent expansions of the  
neurosciences. Whether we witness art historians finding fault with  
neuro-enthusiastic colleagues, linguists warning of a ‘new biologism’,  
ethicists, science policy strategists and anthropologists pondering  
the future impacts of neuroscience, literary critics and artists  
dabbling in mirror-neurons, or media-savvy neuroscientists forming a  
new kind of public intellectual, the neurosciences have, without  
question, inspired a great deal of scholarly and not-so-scholarly  
action. Indeed, so familiar have these discourses become, so seemingly  
self-evident their significance, that the problematisations of the  
neurosciences rarely appear to move beyond elaborations of the already  
familiar or, at best, partisan polemics.

More problematic, on closer inspection the majority of these diverse  
neuro-discourses would seem to operate on a very thin evidential  
basis. Claims being made about neuroscience’s societal impacts more  
often than not possess the same kind of impressionistic qualities as  
the growing alarmism on the part of Geisteswissenschaftler lamenting  
the neuro-induced loss of cultural capital and contracting research  
budgets. The conspicuous absence of a solid evidential basis in these  
matters is the working hypothesis of our upcoming workshop: Neuro- 
Reality Check.
The workshop brings together scholars from a diversity of disciplinary  
backgrounds with the aim of stepping back a little - and of probing  
deeper into the alleged effects and actual causes of the ongoing  
neurohype. Our aim, in other words, is to encourage a more de-centred  
kind of analysis than the one typically pursued: Why, for instance, is  
it that art historians or political theorists choose to eschew  
‘theory’ in favour of neuroscientific wisdom? Which ideological sea- 
changes reside behind the frequently proclaimed ‘crisis’ in the  
humanities, and how do they resonate with the turn to the ‘neuro’?  
What are the interests and economic conditions driving the mushrooming  
of interdisciplinary neuro-X academic subfields in the contemporary  
academic landscape? Or again, is it really – empirically - the case  
that we are on the verge on of a ‘neuro-revolution’, our life-worlds,  
language and habits already being subtly transformed?

Please contact us if you wish to attend (schoudhury [AT] mpiwg- 
berlin.mpg.de or mstadler [AT] mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). Participation is  
open, but spaces are limited.


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