Neurosocialities: Anthropological Engagements with the Neurosciences

Neurobiological limits and the somatic significance of love: Caregivers’ engagements with neuroscience in Scottish parenting programmes

“…Critical scholars have argued that neuroscientific knowledge has more potential to shape subjectivities because of its allure, even though enjoinders to parents that interpolate neurological ideas have not necessarily changed so much compared to previous decades of parenting advice. Our analysis extends other empirical and conceptual scholarship that describes the multiplicity of epistemologies and ontologies that form contemporary subjectivities, within which the neurosciences are not, as a matter of course, dominant but rather co-exist with and further complicate other ways of understanding what it means to be human (Gardner et al, 2018;Pickersgill, Cunningham-Burley, and Martin, 2011;Pickersgill, Martin, and Cunningham-Burley, 2015;Singh, 2013;Smith, 2019).…”

“…While neuroscience is often criticised for being reductionist, Beaulieu (2003: 563) has argued that it can be analytically more useful to consider investigations of the brain as semiotically generative: she encourages sensitivity to how neuroscientific work ‘powerfully redefines concepts like behaviour, nurture, culture and environment’. Gardner et al (2018: 191) make a similar argument when they suggest the importance of investigating ‘how [neurological] potentials become culturally relevant’.…”

“…Indeed, previous studies have indicated that different actors engage with neuroscientific notions in diverse ways (Pickersgill, Cunningham-Burley, and Martin, 2011; Singh, 2013). Based on such studies, Gardner et al (2018: 191) have suggested that it might be productive to speak of ‘multiple neurosocialities’, where the ‘transformative effects [of neuroscientific developments] depend on how they become immersed in local practices by creative and pragmatic agents’ (ibid. : 190).…”