cmb | december 2021 – january 2022 | newsletter view online
CMB Member News
New Books

We celebrate two new books by CMB network members!

In October, Palgrave Macmillan published  Widening the Frame with Visual Psychological Anthropology: Perspectives on Trauma, Gendered Violence, and Stigma in Indonesia by CMB network member and FPR president Rob Lemelson. A book launch at UCLA's Department of Anthropology is scheduled for January 19, 2022!

This month, the University of California Press published The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan by CMB network member Chikako Ozawa-de Silva. Link to UC Press flier with 30% discount.

Awards and Publications
Suparna Choudhury
Suparna Choudhury
Read the special issue of Frontiers in Neuroscience, "Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research in the Field of Critical (Sex/Gender) Neuroscience," co-edited by Suparna Choudhury.
Link to special issue
Laurence Kirmayer
Laurence Kirmayer
Laurence had several publications and presentations this year. In addition, he is organizing the in-person Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry at McGill. More information on the CMB workshop and Advanced Study Institute is included at the end of this email. A link to the full Summer program is provided below.
Link to McGill 2022 Summer Program
 
Publications
 
Khalili-Mahani, N., Holowka, E., Woods, S., Khaled, R., Roy, M., Lashley, M., Glatard, T., Tim-Bottos, J., Dahan, A., Niesters, M., Hovey, R.B., Simon, B., & Kirmayer, L.J. (2021). Play the Pain: A digital strategy for play-oriented research and action. Frontiers in Psychiatry: Digital Mental Health12(746477): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.746477
 
Cohen-Fournier, S., Brass, G. & Kirmayer, L.J. (2021). Decolonizing health care: Challenges of cultural and epistemic pluralism in medical decision making with Indigenous communities. Bioethics35(8): 767-778. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12946
 
Brunet, A., Sapkota, R.P. Guragain, B., Tremblay, J., Saumier, D. & Kirmayer, L.J. (2021). Tackling the global problem of traumatic stress in low-income countries: A pilot clinical trial comparing reconsolidation therapy to paroxetine in Nepal. BMC Psychiatry, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-021-03441-6

 

 

Presentations
 
Invited plenary lecture, “Landscapes of trauma: A social-ecological approach to cultural diversity in mental health research, training and practice,” 21st Australasian Conference on Traumatic Stress, September 14, 2021 [Online]

 

Invited plenary lecture, “Interdisciplinarity in the study of culture, mind and brain,” Bali Psychiatry Update, Universitas Udayana,  July 16, 2021 [Online]

Shinobu Kitayama
Shinobu Kitayama
Please join us in congratulating Shinobu, recipient of the 2022 APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award! According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions “honors psychologists who have made distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology.” Shinobu will be presented with the award at the 2022 APA annual meeting. Read Shinobu's fascinating personal/professional odyssey ("Seeking the Middle Way: An Exploration of Culture, Mind, and Brain") by clicking below.
Link to essay
Daniel Lende
Daniel Lende
Read Daniel's new paper, "Elements of Neuroanthropology," in Frontiers in Psychology on his quest to understand "brains in the wild."
Link to paper
Sally Seraphin
Sally Seraphin
Sally was awarded two faculty fellowships in 2021 and a book proposal development grant supporting diverse voices from Princeton University Press. She also participated in the SEE-Diversity Workshop offered by the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. A list of new publications and info on Sally's 2021 Society for Neuroscience presentation are provided below.
Link to the Thinking Republic
 
Seraphin, S.B. Fluctuating brain asymmetry: A tool for studying the evolutionary developmental ecology (Evo-Devo) of early trauma, maltreatment, and neglect. Society for Neuroscience, 50th Annual Meeting. Chicago, Illinois (Virtual). November 8-11, 2021. 

 

Harwell, J.P., Jensen, M., Parker, S.O., Seraphin, S.B. Righteous Indignation:  Prosecutorial Misconduct, Brady, and the Cognitive Limits of Self-Policing. The Tennessee Law Review. Volume 87, Issue 3.

 

Seraphin, S., Stock, S. Non-disposable assignments for remote neuroscience laboratory teaching using analysis of human data. The Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education (JUNE). December,  2020, 19(1): A105-A112. https://www.funjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/june-19-105.pdf?x89760  

Jeff Snodgrass
Jeff Snodgrass
Jeff is the lead author of "Indian Gaming Zones as Oppositional Subculture: A Norm Incongruity 'Cultural Dissonance' Approach to Internet Gaming Pleasure and Distress," Current Anthropology, published online 11/22/2021. According to Jeff, this work "lays the basis for a theoretical and methodological approach underlying some of the things I'll do in the new FPR grant."
Link to paper
More Kudos for Members
LAURENCE KIRMAYER
BRANDON KOHRT

CMB network members Laurence Kirmayer and Brandon Kohrt are acknowledged for special thanks in the UNICEF State of the World’s Children Report 2021

 

Best Thing That Happened to US in 2021
"US Inauguration Day"
"YOU!"
Upcoming Events
2022 Focused Discussions
 

 

2022 Summer
Culture, Mind and Brain Workshop

S. Choudhury, L. Kirmayer, S. Veissière & Guest Faculty

 

Co-sponsored by the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (www.thefpr.org) and the McGill Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives Program (www.mcgill.ca/hbhl). This workshop will provide an overview of core topics and recent developments in social, and cultural neuroscience research in order to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration in global mental health. After an introduction to cognitive, social, and cultural neuroscience, the workshop will focus on the potential and limits of methods that can be used to measure epigenetic, neuroendocrine, and neurocognitive processes in laboratory and field settings. We will discuss the inter-relationships of these processes and how to map them onto phenomenological, ethnographic, and ecological variables to capture health-relevant aspects of sociocultural contexts in situ. Participants will have the opportunity to present their own research projects for discussion with faculty.

 

Text: Kirmayer, L.J., Worthman, C., Kitayama, S., Lemelson, R. & Cummings, C. (Eds.) (2020). Culture, Mind and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods & Applications. Cambridge University Press.

Date: June 20-23, 2022 (24 hours) M•T·W·Th10:00 -17:00 + Video lectures.

 

McGill Advanced Study Institute
 

The Fragility of Truth: Social Epistemology in a Time of Polarization and Pandemic

 June 28-30, 2022

Institute of Community & Family Psychiatry

4333 Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine, Montréal, QC, H3T 1E4

 The COVID pandemic, political polarization, and the climate crisis and have all revealed that large segments of the population do not trust the best available knowledge and expertise in making vital decisions regarding their health, the governance of society, and the fate of the planet. What guides information-seeking, trust in authority, and decision-making in each of these domains? Finding reliable information to make decisions presents enormous challenges in a world in which the internet increases access to information, accelerates the viral spread of images and ideas, and creates loops that amplify extreme positions. Many people seem to be captured by an array of increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories and ill-informed interpretations of events. Are we facing a new level of self-destructive irrationality in human behaviour, or has the age of pandemics and the digital niche simply revealed the fragility of human knowledge-seeking? Is conflict over meaning along tribal lines intrinsic to human thought and sociality? How do people make sense of complex events and chart a course in a sea of information, misinformation and deliberate disinformation? How have social media changed the dynamics of information seeking, certainty and authority? What role do scientific and technocratic communication play in these dynamics? This Advanced Study Institute will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and public health to consider the challenges posed by the new information ecology. Sessions will address: (1) theories of social epistemology, rationality and irrationality, science and pseudoscience; (2) case studies of the dynamics of misinformation; (3) pathologies of information seeking and belief, paranoia, delusion; and (4) strategies for healthy knowledge ecologies.

 

The ASI will have two components: a workshop for researchers working in these areas and a public conference for mental health practitioners, students and social scientists.  Selected papers will be published in a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry.

 

Guest Faculty

Harry Collins, Igor Grossman, Laurence Monnais, Barbara Stiegler

 

McGill Faculty

Kimiz Dalkir, G. Eric Jarvis, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Vincent Laliberté, Cécile Rousseau, Samuel Veissière

Blog
Follow-up Focused Discussion (Guillaume Dumas) Summary
December 13, 2021
Read more...
Social Physiology for Precision Psychiatry (Summary)
November 14, 2021
Read more...

 

Malibu, CA, December 2021

Do you have something to announce or share? Email us at [email protected]!
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Los Angeles, California
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