[ecrea] CfP IX Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture "Neurohumanities: Promises & Threats"

*IX Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture*

**

*Neurohumanities*

*Promises & Threats*

**

*Lisbon, July 1-6, 2019*

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2019*

When the US government declared the 1990s “The decade of the brain”, it 
aimed at raising public awareness toward the use of neuroscience for the 
enhancement of life quality and as a way to better address the 
challenges of growing life expectancy. The initiative was further 
supported by substantial research funding, which not only impressed 
public opinion but appealed to many research fields. Finding a link to 
brain research and the processes of the human mind, many disciplines 
were repositioned and adopted the “neuro” prefix, promising new insights 
into age-old problems by reframing them from the angle of the brain-mind 
continuum.

Neuroscience seeks to explain how the brain works and which 
neurophysiological processes are involved in complex cognitive abilities 
like sensation and perception attention and reasoning, memory and thought.

One of the most striking and unique features of the human mind is its 
capacity to represent realities that transcend its immediate time and 
space, by engaging complex symbolic systems, most notably language, 
music, arts and mathematics. Such sophisticated means for representation 
are arguably the result of an environmental pressure and must be 
accounted for in a complex network of shared behaviors, mimetic actions 
and collaborative practices: in other words, through human culture. The 
cultural products that are enabled by these systems are also stored by 
means of representation in ever-new technological devices, which allow 
for the accumulation and sharing of knowledge beyond space and across time.

The artifacts and practices that arise from the symbolic use, exchange 
and accumulation are the core of the research and academic field known 
as the Humanities. The field has been increasingly interested in the 
latest developments deriving from neuroscience and the affordances they 
allow about the conditions and processes of the single brain, embedded 
in an environment, in permanent exchange with other brains in an ecology 
that is culturally coded.

This turn of the humanities to neuroscience is embraced by many and 
fiercely criticized by others. The promise of the Neurohumanities, the 
neuroscientifically informed study of cultural artifacts, discourses and 
practices, lies in unveiling the link between embodied processes and the 
sophistication of culture. And it has the somewhat hidden agenda of 
legitimizing the field, by giving it a science-close status of relevance 
and social acknowledgement it has long lacked. Here, though, lies also 
its weakness: should the Humanities become scientific? Can they afford 
to do so? Should they be reduced to experimental methodologies, 
collaborative research practices, sloppy concept travelling, 
transvestite interdisciplinarity? Is the promise of the Neurohumanities, 
seen by some as the ultimate overcoming of the science-humanities or the 
two cultures divide, in fact not only ontologically and methodologically 
impossible and more than that undesirable? And how will fields like 
Neuroaesthetics, Cognitive Literary Theory, Cognitive Linguistics, 
Affect Theory, Second-person Neuroscience, Cognitive Culture Studies or 
Critical Neuroscience relate to the emerging omnipresence and challenges 
of Artificial Intelligence?

The IX Summer School for the Study of Culture invites participants to 
submit paper and poster proposals that critically consider the 
developments of the Neurohumanities in the past decades and question its 
immediate and future challenges and opportunities. Paper proposals are 
encouraged in but not limited to the following topics:

·4E Cognition: embodied, embedded, enacted and extended

·performance and the embodied mind

·spectatorship and simulation

·from individual to social cognition

·mental imagery

·empathy

·memory, culture and cultural memory

·cognition and translatability

·mind-body problem

·life enhancement

·neuro-power

·(neuro)humanities and social change

·AI, cognition and culture


The Summer School will take place at several cultural institutions in 
Lisbon and will gather outstanding doctoral students and post-doctoral 
researchers from around the world. In the morning there will be lectures 
and master classes by invited keynote speakers. In the afternoon there 
will be paper presentations by doctoral students.

**

*Paper proposals*

Proposals should be sent to (lxsummerschool /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(lxsummerschool /at/ gmail.com)> no later than February 28, 2019 and 
include paper title, abstract in English (max. 200 words), name, e-mail 
address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 100 words) 
mentioning ongoing research.

Applicants will be informed of the result of their submissions by March 
15, 2019.

*Rules for presentation*

The organizing committee shall place presenters in small groups 
according to the research focus of their papers. They are advised to 
stay in these groups for the duration of the Summer School, so a 
structured exchange of ideas may be developed to its full potential.

*Full papers submission*

Presenters are required to send in full papers by May 30, 2019.

The papers will then be circulated amongst the members of each research 
group and in the slot allotted to each participant (30’), only 10’ may 
be used for a brief summary of the research piece. The Summer School is 
a place of networked exchange of ideas and organizers wish to have as 
much time as possible for a structured discussion between participants. 
Ideally, in each slot, 10’ will be used for presentation, and 20’ for 
discussion.

*Registration fees*

Participants with paper – 290€ for the entire week (includes lectures, 
master classes, doctoral sessions, lunches and closing dinner)

Participants without paper – 60€ per session/day | 190€ for the entire week

*Fee waivers*

For The Lisbon Consortium students, there is no registration fee.

For students from Universities affiliated with the European Summer 
School in Cultural Studies and members of the Excellence Network in 
Cultural Studies the registration fee is 60€.

*Organizing Committee*

·Isabel Capeloa Gil

·Peter Hanenberg

·Alexandra Lopes

·Paulo de Campos Pinto

·Diana Gonçalves

·Clara Caldeira

·Rita Bacelar





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