The Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science is hosting a “neuro-reality check” workshop to be held in Berlin in December. Their purpose is to scrutinize “the ‘neuro-turn’ in the humanities and natural sciences.” But they also aim to look beyond the usual pro and con.

Our ambition is to take problematisations of the neurosciences to another level. While numerous new scholarly projects in the social sciences and humanities have recently emerged to analyze the growth of ‘neuromania’, our workshop aims to bring together scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds in order to step back a little, and to probe deeper into the alleged effects and actual causes of the ongoing neurohype. This will include exploring the extent to which discourses engendering neuroscience in fact do match neuroscience’s real world (social) effects; but it will also include interrogating the anatomy of the neuro-discourses themselves, and to locate the immense attractions and functions of the ‘neuro’ in the broader scheme of — intellectual and political — things: the promise and attractions of ‘interdisciplinarity’ within contemporary humanities; the surge of underlabouring specialities such as neuroethics; or the rise and growing acceptance, within recent years, of a new (neuro) ‘biologism’ in a great many academic disciplines and popular culture at large, as well as the opposition this engenders.

For successful applicants, MPI will cover the cost of travel and accommodation in Berlin. Continue reading CFP for funded neuroskeptic workshop in Berlin →