To initiate this working group, we held a workshop at the Institute for Society & Genetics at UCLA on the topic of midcentury brain science. Cross-fertilizing cultural, political, intellectual, and technical-scientific history, this workshop’s contributions ask: How did the midcentury brain sciences ramify across cultural and political discourses, and simultaneously, how did these discourses shape the technical affordances and practices of these brain sciences? This workshop will result in a special issue of The Journal of the History of Ideas.
In our view, this workshop would accomplish two major aims at once. First, it would scaffold the social and intellectual network for the Material Intelligence as Historical Problem working group, most notably securing footholds for future collaboration with influential research centers and resources in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the US. Second, it would model the type of scholarly intervention our working group will platform: scholarship (in history, sociology,
and so on) that weds technical literacy with an ambitious interdisciplinary remit, in order to critique the discourse of novelty rather than taking it as its starting point.
Participants
Our list of invitees to this workshop consists of collaborators in the field who will form key nodes in scaffolding this interdisciplinary research collective.
They include:
- Cornelius Borck (University of Lubeck, Germany)
- Andreas Killen (CUNY)
- Danielle Carr (UCLA)
- Yvan Prkachin (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
- Nadine Weidner (Harvard)
- Jean Gael Barbara (CNRS, Paris, France)
