Day: July 8, 2009

Language, Culture and Mind Conference IV

laiva
The fourth edition of the Language, Culture and Mind conference will take place at Åbo Akademi University on June 21-23rd, 2010. Åbo Akademi is located in Turke, Finland.

The main goal of the LCM conference is: “to articulate and discuss approaches to human natural language and to diverse genres of language activity which aim to integrate its cultural, social, cognitive, affective and bodily foundations [and] to contribute to situating the study of language in a contemporary interdisciplinary dialogue, and to promote a better integration of cognitive and cultural perspectives in empirical and theoretical studies of language.”

Plenary speakers are:

Bradd Shore (Emory University)
Dan Zahavi (Centre for Subjectivity Research, Copenhagen)
Cornelia Müller (Berlin Gesture Centre and Europa Universität Viadrina)
Peggy Miller, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Topics include:

•biological and cultural co-evolution
•comparative study of communication systems
•cognitive and cultural schematization in language
•emergence of language in ontogeny and phylogeny
•language in multi-modal communication
•language and normativity
•language and thought, emotion and consciousness.

To present something, here’s the basic info: “Abstracts of up to 500 words, including references, should be sent to lcm4turku@gmail.com as an attachment, in pdf or rtf format. Indicate if the abstract is for an oral or poster presentation. Note that there will be proper poster session(s), with one minute self-presentations to the audience in the plenary hall, just before the poster session. The deadline for abstract submission is Dec 15, 2009.”

All the details on participation are here.

And here’s the main LCM IV Conference website.

Wednesday Round Up #71

So this week, we’ve got a bunch of short things up front – faves, science & health journalism, brain health, book recommendations, and the environment. Then I go onto anthropology and neuroscience.

Top of the List

Bruno Latour, What Is the Style of Matters of Concern?
Latour’s Spinoza lectures – one on our understanding of nature, the other on aesthetics and active philosophy (or, stop committing violence to our common sense…)

Jason Mitchell, Contributions of Functional Neuroimaging to the Study of Social Cognition
Pdf of a 2008 paper from the Harvard psychologist – a nice overview that also addresses some of the critiques

Nicolas Baumard, In Praise of Neuroscience (for once)
Looking at how parts of the brain are specialized for culture, seen through the localization of the Visual Word Form area (part of how you read) across subjects and societies and in neuronal constraints on writing systems

Alex Golub, Golublog
Alex has been writing on his return to fieldwork in Papua New Guinea – great to read the series of posts sharing the trials and dilemmas of doing ethnographic work

Incubus, Are You In?
Just a song I enjoyed

Bob Herbert, Behind the Façade
The best thing I read this past week -the NY Times columnist discusses Michael Jackson and our culture of immaturity and irresponsibility.

Troublemaker’s Fringe – Problems in the Journalism of Science and Health

Petra Boyton, Reporting Back from Last Night’s Troublemaker’s Fringe
Petra, Vaughan Bell and Ben Goldacre get together to discuss bad journalism of science and health. What an event. Petra slants her comments towards the eight problems she sees in today’s journalism.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #71”