The next Critical Neuroscience conference will be held January 30, 2009 at UCLA. The theme this time is “Challenging Reductionism in Psychiatry and Social Neuroscience.” It will be held at the Semel Institute Auditorium and there is free admission as long as you register. To register, send an email to criticalneuro at gmail.com. For more details, you can also contact Suparna Choudhury, one of the main organizers (and a promising young scholar in her own right!), at schoudhury at mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

The presenters include Joseph Dumit, whose book Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity is a must-read in this area.

Shaun Gallagher is another heavy-hitter, and author of the recent book How The Body Shapes The Mind.

Steven Rose recently penned Lifelines: Beyond the Gene and The Future of the Brain: The Promises and Perils of Tomorrow’s Neuroscience.

Evan Thompson just came out with Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.

(Reminder to self: start writing heavy books with big titles… instill awe in other bloggers as they copy Amazon links.)

Cornelius Borck and Laurence Kirmayer are also coming, two people who presented at the last Critical Neuroscience workshop in July in Montreal.

Neuroscience in Context, the European group, is again sponsoring this conference. It fits well, as NIC is all about “critical perspectives, neuroethics, and anthropology.” McGill’s Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry is sponsoring the conference once more as well.

The new sponsor is The Foundation for Psychocultural Research. Founded by Robert Lemelson, the Foundation’s mission is “to support and advance interdisciplinary research projects and scholarship at the intersection of psychology, culture, neuroscience and psychiatry, with an emphasis on Psychocultural factors as central, not peripheral.”

The workshop in July produced a string of popular posts here at Neuroanthropology, as I was lucky enough to attend that conference. Here are some fan favorites: The Three Aspects of Critical Neuroscience; Neurotosh, Neurodosh, and Neurodash; Pop Goes the Media; Psychopharma-parenting (very funny!); and The Cultural Brain in Five Flavors.