Neurocultures Manifesto, or Having a Critical Mind in the Age of the Brain
Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Neurocultures refers to how our cultural landscapes are affected by the prominence of neuroscientific modes of thought. The brain has been put forward as foundational for knowing about the self and social life, and neuroscientists are being asked to be the philosophers, sociologists and gender theorists of our era. Brain matter is also mattering. Its materiality is now making itself known everywhere: in images, texts, in culture, in embodied practices, in the clinic and the hospital and the school, in everyday life. Scholars and artists outside the sciences are expanding and diversifying knowledge about the brain, and about science, by offering critical perspectives that take the social and cultural as seriously as the biological. In the Neurocultures Manifesto, Pitts-Taylor argues for critical, interdisciplinary thinking about neuroscience, particularly by those of us who do not belong to one of the scientific fields generating brain knowledge. In this talk, she explains her Manifesto and elaborates with examples from her recent book The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics..

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is author or editor of five books on the body in culture, medicine and science. She teaches at Wesleyan University, where she is Chair of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Professor of Science in Society and Sociology. Her book The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics won the 2016 Feminist Philosophy of Science Award from the PSA Women’s Caucus.