71 research outputs found
Voorbij reductionisme en determinisme als kritiek op de neurowetenschappen?
No full textRecensie van: Nikolas R. Rose & Joelle M. Abi-Rached (2013) Neuro. The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.Recensie van: Nikolas R. Rose & Joelle M. Abi-Rached (2013) Neuro. The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press
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"The Dead Which Cannot Be Buried": War, Madness, and Modernity in the Levant, 1896-1982
No full textDrawing on a wide variety of archival and primary sources, this dissertation reconstructs the history of ʿAṣfūriyyeh, one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in the Middle East, as a window into the ways in which modern medicine changed common perceptions and understandings of mental illness as well as the wider socio-political role that ʿAṣfūriyyeh played in the region.
The rise and fall of ʿAṣfūriyyeh—from its founding in 1896 until its closure in 1982, in a region marked by significant political upheavals—calls for a revisionist interpretation of the role and impact of the birth of psychiatry in the region. Not only do apologist and post-colonial histories hinder any account of the metamorphoses that such institutions underwent after the age of empire, but they also miss and obscure important discontinuities—notably the erosion of missionary fervor and the increasing role of local agencies (political, social, and professional) in shaping the future and the impact of such endeavors.
The dissertation argues that ʿAṣfūriyyeh was the product of collective actions and influences (both local and global). The Hospital owed its existence, survival, and growth to various factors, including an unabated rivalry between foreign powers and among missionaries as well as to local aspirations for medical enlightenment and modernity. ʿAṣfūriyyeh was a project that was embraced rather than rejected by the general population and was reproduced rather than critiqued by the local elite.
The dissertation identifies two major departures from the historiography of Western lunatic asylums. In contrast to the European and North American contexts, where policies of deinstitutionalization played a central role in moving the mentally ill from large psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s, it was the Middle East’s changing geopolitical reality and its underlying moral economy that ultimately reconfigured the mental-health-care landscape. First, psychiatric hospitals grew in size in the post-colonial/post-imperial context. Second, the downfall of ʿAṣfūriyyeh—an emphatically non-sectarian institution throughout its history—during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) paradoxically marked the birth of the sectarianization of health care. Finally, the dissertation proposes a new analytical framework to make sense of the afterlife of such institutions.History of Scienc
The implications of the new brain sciences
No full textThe ‘Decade of the Brain’ is over but its effects are now becoming visible as neuropolitics and neuroethics, and in the emergence of neuroeconomie
Robert A. Aronowitz. Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society
No full text“Breast cancer is all around us.” This is how Robert Aronowitz, a medical doctor, opens his timely Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society. We are all familiar with the truism that “one in eight American women” will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. The pink ribbon has come to symbolize both solidarity and hope. Mammograms and “Self-Breast Examination” have become part of women’s daily routine, if not a spectre haunting their daily lives. Yet the evidence remains contested and the therapeutic promise, the fear and hope associated with this “obstinate” disease as problematic as ever. Unnatural History weaves all these different elements, artifactual and natural, emotional and rational, vital and morbid, in the socio-historical narrative of breast cancer in the American context. In that sense, this is an “unnatural” history, a history of how “fear” and “risk” have been reshaping a disease, which continues to be as elusive as it was two centuries ago
Traces of the future: An archaeology of medical science in twenty-first-century Africa
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Critical Friendship After the Pandemic
No full textAre critique and the “art of governing” antithetical? The aim of this article is to examine this tension that was laid bare by the Covid-19 pandemic by introducing “critical friendship” as a conceptual framework for a constructive interdisciplinary engagement with science in a post-pandemic era. It does so by drawing on several works and insights: (i) Michel Foucault’s notion of “critical attitude” as well as his assessment of philosophy as providing a “diagnosis of the present;” (ii) Bruno Latour and colleagues’ idea of a “critical zone” or what I call a horizontal epistemology of critique; (iii) Aristotle’s notion of friendship as being necessary for the “common good;” and finally (iv) Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the messianic character of friendship in the constitution of progressive democracies. Whereas critical theory has been described as either “explanatory-diagnostic” or “emancipatory-utopian,” a critical friendship approach aims to be both diagnostic and emancipatory in an age of uncertainty and democratic backsliding
Post-war mental health, wealth, and justice
No full textThe paper launches a normative debate on an under-assessed health policy problem, namely post-war mental health. It explores its ethical dimensions and argues for a strong moral claim to invest in it as a form of reparation that must be added to the jus post-bellum’s truncated list of recommendations. Many countries are currently involved in armed conflict and many more still recovering from past wars. These generally belong to the low-to-middle income group that spend minimally on social and health expenditures.The problem worsens post-war for these countries are burdened with an increased prevalence of mental health disorders with far-reaching repercussions. Failure to recognize in particular war-related psychosocial sequels could weaken capacity to recover and may contribute to a nation’s socio-political unrest that could perpetuate throughout generations. The paper argues that reconstructing war-torn societies should be achieved by rebuilding first and foremost the shattered individual. Policy-makers have a stronger positive obligation to invest in post-war mental health because of a shared responsibility for the harm inflicted. This consequently means a shared responsibility in building a sustainable and viable post-war ‘minimally just state’.The paper draws on Pogge’s ‘relational conceptions of justice’ and the concept of‘shared responsibility’ used in contemporary environmental discourses. It challenges the old paradigmatic model of the just-war tradition which views the world as an archipelagos of well-delineated, self-contained and atomized actors. It also aims to set the stage for an ‘ethics of post-war mental health’ in line with what Ricoeur calls ‘an ethics of memory’
From Brain to Neuro: The Brain Research Association and the Making of British Neuroscience, 1965–1996
No full textENSN launch, London, November 2007. Neuroscience and society: a multidendritic neuron
No full textThis report is a synoptic review of the proceedings of the European Neuroscience and Society Network (ENSN) launch. ENSN, is a European forum that discusses the social, political, economic, and ethical implications of the brain sciences from a multidisciplinary approach. Since it is the leading European forum of its kind, it is worthwhile reflecting on the various debates raised by the experts convened from different academic and professional backgrounds. In the first part of the report, I recapitulate the plenary lectures and workshops and intercalate them with a few thoughts and analyses. The second part is a systematic analysis of the different key themes, issues, and challenges raised and debated during the two-day conference. This could constitute an epistemic framework for further investigation of the impact and implications of the main controversial claims and new concepts that are emerging amidst unprecedented developments in the fastest growing scientific field of the past and present century. I conclude by underlining the importance of such a network of scientists and social scientists in examining the emerging fields of the ‘new brain sciences’
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