This article is part of the following series: A reader's guide to the "ontological turn"
Editor’s note: In the wake of the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked several scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?” This was the reading list …
I want to invite those attending this year’s American Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago to view the screening of Off Label, a documentary film by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher released in 2012 (Saturday, the 23rd @ 5pm in PDR4 at the Chicago Hilton). The film captures, in a very effective and emotional way, how people come to …
When I was in graduate school during the early 2000s, there was a lot of discussion taking place about “subjectivity.” I found much of this conversation deeply confusing, in part because so little was being done pedagogically to sort out the work being carried out under this term from research under a number of cognate rubrics such as “self” and …
These two courses, one undergraduate and the other graduate, explore the cultural patterning of mental health and healing, of psychological flourishing and disorder. Both courses aim to help students appreciate how the cultural anthropological analysis of mental health can be enriched by (neuro)biological and psychological/ clinical perspectives. The undergraduate course has a “science and technology studies” feel to it, exploring …
As I’ve written about on this site before, one of the best short programs for anyone interested in culture and mental health is the Summer School in Social and Cultural Psychiatry held annually at McGill. The course at the center of the curriculum is “Cultural Psychiatry: A Critical Introduction” which consists primarily of lectures by Laurence Kirmayer, Allan Young…
I’ve written in the past (here and here) about the Critical Neuroscience project – an effort led by a group of social and biological scientists and philosophers to develop “a reflexive scientific practice that responds to the social, cultural and political challenges posed by the advances in the behavioural and brain sciences,” (Choudhury, Nagel and Slaby 2009…