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Neuroscience and Society Network (NSN) Symposium

Organised by King’s Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC), with support from the ESF, the symposium 'Towards Neuro-Social Science: the politics and pragmatics of collaboration' will be held on 11 December 2014 at KCL, London (UK).

The Symposium is open to participants, at all levels career levels, but especially Post-Graduate and early-career academics working across the social sciences, humanities and life sciences.

KEYNOTE: Allan Young, Marjorie Bronfman Professor in Social Studies in Medicine, McGill University

The more we experiment on and with the human brain and nervous system, the more we realize that our neurobiological inheritances are bound up with cultural, semiotic, bodily, societal and aesthetic ‘webs’ – and vice versa. New forms of exchange between neuroscientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars are emerging, leading to new concepts of nature and culture, biology and society, affect and cognition, life and death beyond out-moded ideas of ‘nature versus nurture’.

There are, however, few accounts of how such collaborations can or should be done, or of what it is like to experience them. The NSN symposium will help to close this gap, by exploring the ‘politics and pragmatics’ of collaboration between the social sciences, humanities and life sciences. The symposium will offer empirically-situated and theoretical accounts of such collaborations, to assist and advise researchers, at all career levels, interested in establishing, sustaining, and interpreting, their own desires for, and experience of, knowledge exchange between the social sciences, humanities and life sciences.

For more information on the programme, and to register, click here.

Confirmed speakers: Nikolas Rose (NSN Chair, King’s College London), Ilina Singh (King’s College London), Andreas Roepstorff (Aarhus University), Jan Slaby (Free University Berlin), Felicity Callard (Durham University), Des Fitzgerald (King’s College London), Daniel S. Margulies (Max Planck Institute), Sam McLean (King’s College London), Elena Antonova (Institute for Psychiatry), Jonathan Rowson (Royal Society of Arts), Philipp Haueis (Max Planck Institute).

The Symposium is funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and King’s Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre (KISS-DTC). It is related to the former ESF Research Networking Programme European Neuroscience and Society Network (ENSN) and a strategic workshop 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Understanding collaboration between the social sciences and the life sciences'