Volume 11 of “Advances in Medical Sociology” will be dedicated to the theme Sociological Reflections on Neuroscience. You should send abstracts detailing potential contributions by next Monday, February 15th, 2010. Details on abstract submission are at the bottom of the post.

Sociological Reflections on Neuroscience will be edited by Ira van Keulen (Rathenau Institute) and Martyn Pickersgill (University of Edinburgh). Here’s the call for papers:

The Advances in Medical Sociology book series seeks submissions for a new volume on sociological reflections on the neurosciences. Neuroscience is an increasingly influential and prestigious branch of biomedicine, gaining ever more traction within a variety of policy, professional and public cultures. In some respects, neuroscientific ideas and concepts are replacing genetics as a paradigm for understanding the body, the mind and social order, and the relationships between these domains.

Neuroscience therefore demands attention from sociologists. However, to-date, debate around the ‘new brain sciences’ has been limited within sociology, and it has mostly been ethicists who have opened up discussions on the important ethical and epistemological issues neuroscience raises. As a consequence, many of the discussions on the social, ethical, legal and policy implications of the rapidly growing field of the neurosciences have been primarily speculative and theoretical. Thus for this volume of Advances in Medical Sociology: Sociological Reflections on Neuroscience we are specifically looking for articles based on empirical research, from socio-historical analysis to ethnographic research, from surveys to in-depth interviews.

This edited volume of Advances in Medical Sociology aims to be a benchmark text in sociological analyses of neuroscientific research and practice. Accordingly, we call for papers addressing a wide variety of issues pertaining to the sociology of neuroscience, including – but not limited to – the following topics:

1 Knowledge representation in (medical) neuroimaging studies.

2 Changing perceptions of neurological conditions (e.g. Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease) and ‘cognitive functions’ (e.g. attention, memory) within the clinic and in wider society.

3 The neuroscientific (re)construction of psychopathology (e.g. autism, ADHD, depression).

4 The links between neuroscience, clinical practice and subjectivity (including the politics and meanings of ‘neurodiversity’).

5 The rise of novel clinical neurotechnologies (e.g. neurofeedback, deep brain stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation).

6 Representations of the (diseased) brain within and beyond the media.

7 Changing perceptions of the mind-body relationship.

8 The governance and regulation of medical neuroimaging (including the development and implementation of clinical neuroethics).

9 The international production and flow of neuroscientific concepts, knowledge and technology.

10 Neuroscientific understandings of ‘sociological’ terms and concepts such as gender and racism.

This list should be treated as suggestive rather than prescriptive, and we welcome papers that with other germane issues (such as the degree to which longstanding sociological concepts like ‘biographical disruption’ and ‘medicalisation’ have explanatory or descriptive power in thinking about neuroscience, and the potential contribution neuroscience might make to sociology).

Potential contributors should email a 300-500 word abstract by Monday February 15th 2010 to: socofneuroscience@rathenau.nl. Informal enquiries to this address are also welcome. Name and institutional affiliation of author(s) should also be supplied, including full contact details of the main author. Proposals will be reviewed by the editors, and authors notified by 5th April. The deadline for full submissions (7500-8500 words) will be 1st September. Publication of the volume is expected in late 2011.

How would you complete this unfinished quote?

“The convergence of neurology and cross-cultural research provides…”

Continue reading “Complete this quote: “The convergence of neurology and cross-cultural research provides…””

Finissez cette citation :

« Comment s’effectue cette mise en mémoire culturelle ? La rèponse… »

How would you complete the following unfinished quote?

“How does this cultural memory work ? The answer…”

Continue reading “Finissez cette citation : « Comment s’effectue cette mise en mémoire culturelle ? La rèponse… »”

“As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffereing in return?” (Daniel Smith, 2010)

Pelourinho is the historical and cultural drawcard for tourists visiting Salvador da Bahia in Brazil. A lively epicentre of music, dance and restaurants, the area merits its prized holiday destination status. Tourists who visit the Mercado Modelo in Pelourinho might venture beneath this popular market into the slave chambers below and become aware of the tragic history of slavery that haunts the region. What many tourists might not know, however, is that the Pelourinho district underwent massive restoration efforts under the government during the 1970s and the 1990s. The area had become home to the poor and they were offered no more than a month’s wages or nothing at all to vacate and relocate. Studies show that of the 1300 families living in Pelourinho in 1992, only about 200 were able to remain in the neighbourhood (Collins, 2004:212). Those who have seen the changes can tell you how much the tourist development of Pelourinho affected the lives of the people that lived there. But even without a mastery of Portuguese, you don’t have to wander far off the pretty streets of Pelourinho to see a community in disarray. In my own travels, I encountered pregnant women high on drugs, old drunken men wielding screwdrivers as weapons and seven year olds with pocket-knives and guns. You only have to look at the long queue of tourists that line up daily at the tourist-police bureau to understand the amount of crime that plagues the region. Tourists are not being robbed by poor people that hate them, the tourists are being robbed by people who are indifferent to them.

The local government has not stopped removing people from their homes in their bid to increase tourism. There are still attempts to forcefully move people out of the coast-dwelling shanty-towns in order to erect 5-star resorts and luxury wharfs. One of the communities that I worked with in the Alto da Sereia were actively involved in public actions to resist these attempts. There are people who care, but I have to admit that Brazil was the first place where I learnt that indifference really is the opposite of love. So many people have grown up learning to be indifferent to their situation as a psychological survival strategy against solastalgia. This culturally entrained indifference is the source of a lot of crime in Brazil. In my own country, Australia, I am starting to see the cultural entrainment of ‘indifference‘ taking place in another sphere of human concern that affects our homes and where we live.

Continue reading “Solastalgia, Soliphilia and the Ecopsychology of our Changing Environment”

Le Brésil au XIXème et XXIème siècle:
Une étude sur la croissance de la population, de l’urbanisation et de la pollution dans le monde en voie de développement

Le Brésil est un pays caractérisé par d’importants contrastes entre la pauvreté et la richesse, la beauté et la pollution, les “bidonvilles” et les “gratte-ciel(s)”. Dans le monde en voie de développement, le Brésil est considéré comme un exemple de ce qui peut arriver autre part lorsque l’urbanisation est probable. La population urbaine augmente beaucoup plus rapidement dans les pays en voie de développement que dans les régions plus développées. Qu’arrivera-t-il alors, lorsque le modèle de consommation des sociétés hautement urbanisées deviendra global? Avec la croissance de la population devenue incontrôlable, quelles seront nos limites?

“Où que j’aille, la nuit ou le jour, les choses que j’ai vues, je ne peux plus les voir.”
Extrait  de l’ “Ode on Intimation of Immortality”
de  William Worsdworth , 1770 – 1850

Continue reading “Le Brésil au XIXème et XXIème siècle”

Finissez cette citation :

« Bien entendu, il y a encore un gouffre béant entre ce que nous savons actuellement et la compréhension réelle… »

Complete this quote :

“Of course, there remains a yawning chasm between present knowledge and any actual understanding of…”

Continue reading “Finissez cette citation: « Bien entendu, il y a encore un gouffre béant entre ce que nous savons actuellement et la compréhension réelle… »”