Subjectivity and Culture Working Group

The Subjectivity and Culture working group aims to foster conversations about understandings of subjectivity and the brain in social and cultural contexts.  We are interested in exploring the shaping, reshaping and circulation of the subject, as a subject of the unconscious, but also of the biological, medical, technological, political, and cultural.  We would like to create a space where students and faculty from diverse disciplines can regularly meet to review these questions critically, exchange on their research interests and support each other in the development of new modes of exploration.

The working group is grounded in the Berkeley anthropology department, where these questions are addressed by anthropologists, medical anthropologists, science and technology scholars, and biological anthropologists, but would strive to reinforce a dialogue with researchers from other departments, such as rhetoric, comparative literature, history, sociology, as well as various area studies. We would also potentially like to include scholars from neuroscience, psychology and education.  It is also conceived as an invitation to strengthen the existing informal relations with working groups addressing similar sets of questions on other campuses, such as those at UC Davis, UCLA, and Stanford.

Working group founders: Raphaëlle Rabanes and Michael d'Arcy.

2012-2013 working group organizers: Cole Hansen and Raphaëlle Rabanes

For more information, please contact us at townsendsubjectivitygroup@gmail.com