@daniel_lende is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida.

@gregdowney1 is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney

Description: The brain and the nervous system are our most cultural organs. Our nervous system is especially immature at birth, our brain disproportionately small in relation to its adult size and open to cultural sculpting at multiple levels. Recognizing this, the new field of neuroanthropology places the brain at the center of discussions about human nature and culture. Anthropology offers brain science more robust accounts of enculturation to explain observable difference in brain function; neuroscience offers anthropology evidence of neuroplasticity’s role in social and cultural dynamics. This book provides a foundational text for neuroanthropology, offering basic concepts and case studies at the intersection of brain and culture.

The journal “covers the mutual interaction between culture and human cognition and behavior”, “explores the influence of brain/sociocultural interaction on cognitive function and neural mechanisms” and “includes an expansive range of disciplines, from neuroscience to biology to anthropology and philosophy”.

Description

“Many lines of research on culture, mind, and brain can no longer be neatly separated. Some questions run together, thanks to our growing understanding of the genome, the biological roots of human sociality, and the mutual constitution of cultures and selves, as well as the complex interactions between the physical, cultural, and social environments underlying health and illness.

The aim of this 2-day conference is to highlight emerging concepts, methodologies and applications in the study of culture, mind, and brain, with particular attention to:

1. cutting-edge neuroscience research that is successfully incorporating culture and the social world;
2. the context in which methods are used as well as the tacit assumptions that shape research questions; and
3. the kinds and quality of collaborations that can advance interdisciplinary research training.

The conference is designed to appeal to a wide academic audience of biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, and those in related fields interested in learning about cutting-edge interdisciplinary research at the intersection of culture, mind, and brain.”

What I really love about this conference and what makes it even more promising is its actual focus on interdisciplinarity. The impressive speaker list includes Shinobu Kitayama, Shihui Han, Denise Park, Marco Iacoboni, Daniel Lende & Greg Downey (of the Neuroanthropology blog), Georg Northoff, Laurence J. Kirmayer and many more.

Registration

Early registration ends on August 20, 2012. Late registration from August 21, 2012 to September 20, 2012. There is no opportunity for poster presentations, but students may apply for limited conference scholarships to be refunded. For more information and registration link here. Please note that seating is very limited. Please note that the FPR conference in 2010 sold out two months before the end of early registration.

edited by Rom Harré and Fathali M. Moghaddam

Sage, 2012

Description

As the 21st Century opened, the discipline of psychology seemed to be separating into two radically distinct domains. Qualitative and Cultural Psychology focused on the discursive means for the management of meaning in a world of norms, while Neuropsychology and Neuroscience focused on the investigation of brain processes. These two domains can be reconciled in a hybrid science that brings them together into a synthesis more powerful than anything psychologists have achieved before. For the first time, there is the possibility of a general psychology in which the biological and the cultural aspects of human life coalesce into a unitas multiplex, unity in diversity. This textbook ambitiously aims to and succeeds in providing this unity.

Fathali M. Moghaddam and Rom Harré have designed a textbook brought together with additional voices that speak to the similarities and differences of these two seemingly distinctive domains. This bridge-building will encourage a new generation of undergraduate students studying psychology to more fully appreciate the real potential for the study of human behaviour, and as such it will represent a more provocative alternative to standard general psychology textbooks. It also support teaching in a host of courses, namely 2nd and 3rd courses on the conceptual and philosophical nature of psychology, social psychology, critical psychology and cognitive science. Selectively, it will also represent a very interesting and different choice for foundation level students too.

About the editors:

Rom Harré is a reserach professor at Georgetown University and director of the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on language-carried cognitive processes, particularly as these occur in conversations and other interpersonal communication patterns.

Fathali M. Moghaddam is director of Georgetown’s conflict resolution master’s program, also is a professor in the government department and in the McDonough School of Business. His research focuses on cognitive universals and their sources in the domain of justice.

via Georgetown University

Wiley-Blackwell, 2012

Description

Critical Neuroscience brings together multi-disciplinary scholars from around the world to explore key social, historical and philosophical studies of neuroscience, and to analyze the socio-cultural implications of recent advances in the field.

- explores the creative potential for engaging experimental neuroscience with social studies of neuroscience

- Furthers the dialogue between neuroscience and the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities

- Transcends traditional scepticism, introducing novel ideas about ‘how to be critical’ in and about science

- Features contributions from eminent scholars including Steven Rose, Joseph Dumit, Laurence Kirmayer, Shaun Gallagher, Fernando Vidal, Allan Young and Joan Chiao

“Neurological thinking has extended itself into a great many spheres of life, from ‘neuroanthropology’ to ‘neurozoology’. We have urgently needed to understand this development within a broad historical and cultural context and Critical Neuroscience provides us with the necessary tools to engage with neuroscience and its social impacts in productive and intelligent ways. The book will be an extremely important resource for anyone interested in understanding how and why neuroscientific research has led us to think about social life in new ways.”
[Emily Martin, Professor of Anthropology, New York University and author of ‘Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture’]

About the editors:

Suparna Choudhury is Junior Professor at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Berlin Institute for Mind and Brain, Humboldt University, Germany. Her research examines the emergence of the ?neurological adolescent’. She has also published on cultural neuroscience and topics at the intersection of neuroscience and society.

Jan Slaby is Junior Professor in Philosophy of Mind and Emotion at Free University Berlin, Germany. The author of a German-language book exploring the world-disclosing nature of human emotions, he has also been involved in research and teaching on the philosophy of psychiatry, with a particular focus on affective disorders and background feelings.

Duties: The FRA will contribute to a research program that assesses whether priming individuals’ cultural perspectives influences interpretation of written text, using a combination of survey measures and experimental manipulations. Tasks will include organizing meetings, assisting in the collection, organization, synthesis, and analysis of data, as well as collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing research data.  The FRA will also work with the PCP research team to develop surveys, pilot test and validate surveys, manage the team library, prepare research protocols, meet with clients, and assist in writing progress reports, briefings, and technical reports.  Duties may also include fMRI data collection and analysis.

For earliest consideration, apply online here. To read more information about this job opening, the qualifications required and the application process link here.

“We are pleased to announce the development of the international cultural neuroscience consortium (ICNC). The goal of the ICNC is to build an interdisciplinary, international research network in cultural neuroscience.

In the next few years, we look forward to developing working groups, offer travel grants for speakers and students at conferences as well as an online website to connect researchers from interdisciplinary communities and facilitate collaborations in cultural neuroscience to study population health disparities and public policy in global context.

We are grateful for your support to develop the ICNC as well as your continued involvement in the ICNC activities. To further this initiative, we look forward to your responses to an online survey that will help us create research and teaching connections and an active database scholars and policymakers across diverse communities and cultures.

http://kellogg.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_bwm41kUU0e3VCzG

Please feel free to distribute widely to your students, friends and colleagues and we look forward to receiving your suggestions by early November!”

via thefpr.org blog

During his talk, Kirmayer starts by describing the ways in which the brain is culturally constructed. He concludes that culture shapes the brain on different levels (structure, architecture & function but also on a metalevel: it influences paradigms – with a reference to critical neuroscience) and time-scales (evolution, individual development). Kirmayer goes on to talk about the history of a cultural construction of the brain, but cautions the listener that most of this history is rooted in a rather racist and primitive thinking and that a certain legacy of  it persists to this day, as mirrored by a tendency to look at issues in a decontextualized way. He continues with an introduction of the notion of contemporary psychiatry as applied neuroscience and explaines why genetics and neuroimaging are both appealing and limited. In the section on cultural diversity within psychiatry, Kirmayer talks for instance about ethnoracial categories and explains why such categorization is not appropriate. He finally gives a short introduction to cultural neuroscience with examples of studies for example by the SACN and CSCN labs. In this section there were two particular expressed ideas that I am very fond of. The first one refers to the fact that individualism and collectivism are constructs that are not appropriate to describe the variablity within cultures and that there are various ways of configuring an individual sense of personhood. The second idea is related to the fact that dividing the world in polar halves (e.g. East vs West) can’t be accurate and it often isn’t symmetrical either (e.g. the “East” is constructed as an imaginary mirror of the “West”). Kirmayer concludes his talk by stating that in psychiatry, differences need to be embedded in a socio-political context, that these differences need to be confronted, not ignored, but it is essential to set up an ethical framework for doing so.

Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, is James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, a quarterly scientific journal published by Sage (UK) and directs the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit at the Department of Psychiatry, Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital in Montreal where he conducts research on mental health services for immigrants and refugees, psychiatry in primary care, the mental health of Canadian Aboriginal peoples, and the anthropology of psychiatry.

In 1995, the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University inaugurated an annual summer school in social and cultural psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology. The program provides the conceptual background for research and clinical work in social and cultural psychiatry and will be of interest to:

• postdoctoral trainees, researchers, and clinicians in psychiatry and other mental health disciplines
• residents and graduate students in health and social sciences
• physicians, psychologists, social workers and health professionals

The summer program has reached its 17th edition this year, is directed by Laurence J. Kirmayer and will take place from 2nd May – 3rd June 2011. For more information, link here.

information & poster source

The Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina will host its 28th Annual Multicultural Symposium on April 8th. The symposium is organized by the Black Psychology Graduate Student Association. This year’s topic is Cultural Neuroscience: Understanding How Biology & Culture Shape the Mind & Behavior.

Keynote speakers include:

• Dr. Lasana Harris, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University (neural correlates of person perception and decision-making)
• Dr. Joan Chiao, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University (psychological and neural processes underlying social behavior and emotion processing)
• Dr. Vivian Ota Wang, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health (genomics and public health)
• Dr. Susan Fiske, Department of Psychology, Princeton University (stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination).

For additional information on the programme and contact information, link here.

via University of South Carolina Psychology Department Chair’s Blog