The next seminar in the Hearing the Voice Research Seminar series, featuring a presentation by Dr Des Fitzgerald (King’s College London) and Dr Felicity Callard (Durham University) on ‘Experimental Entanglements: Re-thinking the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences’ will take place in the Birley Room at Hatfield College at Durham University (number 20 on this map) on Thursday 8 May 2014, 5.15 pm – 7.15 pm.
Abstract: Interactions between the social sciences and neurosciences are increasingly hard to avoid these days – both in institutions committed to ‘interdisciplinary’ engagements between these domains, and in often worried accounts from the field. However, this paper proposes a new way of understanding, and interacting with, these developments. Starting from the position that contemporary opportunities for collaboration between social scientists and neuroscientists need to be taken seriously, this paper asks how we are to imagine and theorize these emerging possibilities. It argues that the first step in this imaginary act must be to set ourselves against a bloodless and sterile rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity, ’and to instead pursue a much more bold and risky sense of what an experimental approach can look like in this space. The paper analyses existing frameworks for understanding the dynamics between the social- and neuro-sciences, and argues that these (whether enthusiastic or horrified) all take place within ‘the régime of the inter-’, a subterranean frame that interprets interaction ‘between’ disciplines on the basis of their fundamental separateness. The paper argues that, contra this régime, it is no longer practicable or desirable to maintain a hygienic separation between sociocultural webs and neurobiological architecture, whose entanglements remain indifferent to disciplinary ethos and history. But more importantly, it suggests that the cognitive neuroscientific experiment, as a rich space of epistemological and ontological excess, offers a still-mostly-uncharted space for researchers, from all disciplines, to understand, explore and register the outcomes of this realization.
Anyone with an interest in Hearing the Voice research is welcome to attend. If you would like to reserve a place please contact Victoria Patton.
The final Hearing the Voice research seminar in the 2013-2014 series can be found below, with more events to be scheduled in the next academic year.
Thursday 12 June 2014
Dr Sam Wilkinson (Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy, Durham University) on ‘Hearing identity: the (re)presentation of other agents in auditory verbal hallucinations’
All seminars will take place in the Birley Room at Hatfield College from 5 pm to 7 pm. For more information, please contact Victoria Patton.