The GenNa programme of excellence within the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University (Sweden) organizes a three-day event consisting of a public day and a workshop entitled NeuroGenderings: Critical Studies of the Sexed Brain, March 25-27, 2010.
NeuroGenderings will bring together experts from both brain sciences, the humanities and science studies (STS) and aims to launch a transdisciplinary and international network on the broad theme of gender and the brain. The central aim of the workshop is to identify theoretical and methodological strategies for social scientists, cultural scientists and neuroscientists to engage with radical, intersectional feminist studies of the brain.
Keynote addresses will take place in the first, public day of the event, whereas the two-days workshop will be conducted in a group of invited researchers. The workshop is thought to result in an anthology based on the papers presented, and in an international network aiming at future research cooperations.
Some questions we want to address are: Which kinds of critical studies of neuroscience and which neursoscience are needed to counteract neuro-sexism, -heterosexisms and -racisms? How are identities re-conceptualized in neuroscientific experiments? Are sex and gender differences separate variables in neuroscientific experimentation and if yes why? Can and should there be a queer theory of the brain? When does "neurolization" become a social or political problem?
One of our long-term goals is to elaborate a new conceptual approach of the relation between gender and the brain, one that could help to head gender theorists and neuroscientists to an innovative interdisciplinary place, far away from social and biological determinisms but still engaging with the materiality of the brain.
More information