Making Biological Minds

21st-22nd September, 2017

University of Leeds, UK

Organised by Sean Dyde, in cooperation with the University of Leeds and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.

The neurosciences are flourishing, while the relationship between the neurosciences and the humanities is not. Whereas some scholars have welcomed closer collaboration, much work attempting to bring the two together can seem off-puttingly imperial or else preparatory to a larger engagement. These deficiencies in turn have generated widespread doubt that either side has anything to learn from the other. In this two-day conference, we will argue differently. We explore ways in which the broad range of practices, methods and theories within the neurosciences and the humanities may offer cooperation, while the disciplines still retain their professional identities. Both fields working towards a common goal to describe, however tantalisingly, what it means to be human.

The speakers are:

Felicity Callard (Birkbeck University of London)
Reverie, Daydreams and Mind-Wandering in the Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Mind and Brain Sciences

Alfred Cheesman (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Measuring the “Broken Brain”: Neuroimaging and the “Biological Revolution” in American and British Psychiatry

Stephen T Casper (Clarkson University, United States)
A History of Locked-in Syndrome: The Making of Neurological Consciousness, 1880-Present

Chuanfei Chin (National University of Singapore)
Neuroscientific Impasses and Historical Insights

Stephanie Eichberg (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung)
From Metaphor to Molecule: Decoding the Languages of Pain

Liam Kempthorne (University College London) and Sean Dyde (University of Leeds)
Neuroscience and the Humanities: Where to from here?

Åsa Jansson (Durham University)
The Politics of the Borderline Brain: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and Neoliberalism in Swedish Psychiatry

Natasha Lushetich (LaSalle College of the Arts)
The Extended Mind in a Technologically Augmented Body: Neuroplasticity and Bio-Sociality

Richard Milne (University of Cambridge) and Joanna Latimer (University of York)
Pathology’s Progress: Molecular Mobilities and the Neuroscientific Body

Elfed Huw Price (Independent Scholar)
Personhood and the Brain

Tom Quick (University of Manchester)
History in the Laboratory: Digitization, Education, and Design at the Laboratory of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics, University of Oxford

Kathryn Schoefert (King’s College London)
Making the Biological Brain: An Organismic View of Neurosciences and Humanities

Roger Smith (Institute of the History of Science and Technology, Russian Federation)
The Sensing of Movement

Claudia Stein (University of Warwick)
Visions of Economic Man: Biomedical Bodies, Political Economy and History around 1900

Gonzalo Talavera (University of Leeds)
Max Isserlin and the Role of Aphasiology in the Debate on Psychologism in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

Priya Umachandran (King’s College London)
Brain Policy Now?

More details of the conference, including abstracts, can be found at:
https://leedsbasic.wpengine.com/biologicalminds/events/making-biological-minds-conference/

The event is free, but places are limited, so please register at:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/making-biological-minds-tickets-37581575504

Attendees may also be interested in attending our celebrations for the 60th anniversary of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, to be held on the 19th and 20th of September. Further information can be found at:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/40006/centre_for_history_and_philosophy_of_science/3060/get_real

Hope to see you there!