FPR-Hampshire College Cultural, Brain, and Development Program
Founded in 2003 by the FPR and Hampshire professor emerita Barbara Yngvesson, the FPR-Hampshire College Program in Culture, Brain, and Development (FPR-HC CBD) is an innovative interdisciplinary program that encourages faculty and students across all disciplines at the College to bridge intellectual divides by incorporating psychobiological and sociocultural perspectives into their research and teaching/learning. At the core of the CBD Program is the idea that human beings are both thoroughly biological and thoroughly cultural creatures, and that both of these forces interact and influence our development, growth, and activities. The mission is to bridge disciplines by bringing together faculty and students from all schools at Hampshire College, and encouraging them to look at their research and teaching/learning through the interdisciplinary lenses of culture, mind/brain, and human growth and development; through this process of intellectual investigation, CBD aims to challenge students and faculty to reflect upon and closely examine the ways in which their scholarship shapes, and is shaped by, humans and the world around us.
CBD’s ongoing programs and initiatives prepare students to pursue a growing variety of intellectual, community outreach, and artistic paths that demand interdisciplinary agility and engage the multiple perspectives of culture, mind/brain, and human growth and development. Additional funding is provided by the CBD Student Research Endowment. CBD currently is in its third cycle of funding from the FPR, and is directed by Pamela Stone.
Founded in 2010, the primary objective of the Culture, Brain, Development, and Mental Health Program (CBDMH), which is co-directed by psychological anthropologist Doug Hollan of UCLA and cultural psychologist Steve López of USC, is to establish a strong research and research training program in cultural psychiatry, with an emphasis on integrating neuroscience and social science perspectives.
The initiative is organized around three research sites in Los Angeles and Montreal and several ongoing, sustainable field sites in India, Nepal, Mexico, and Singapore.
Research sites:
- Culture, Neuroscience, and Psychosis
- Culture and Disability: Autism Spectrum Disorder in India and the US
- Cultural Psychiatry: Integrating Ethnography and Neuroscience in Global Mental Health Research
The FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development (CBD) was founded in 2002 to foster training and research at UCLA to explore how culture and social relations inform brain development, how the brain organizes cultural and social development, and how development gives rise to a cultural brain. The group sought to understand how the brain makes it natural to acquire, use, and create culture; how development builds on neurally mediated socio-cultural practices; how social relations are culturally informed; how culture is acquired in social interaction; and, how culture and social relations are constructed through neurally potentiated developmental processes.
Funding was provided by Robert Lemelson and the FPR to aid CBD trainees and faculty in the pursuit of these research goals and to allow CBD to host public lectures and mini-conferences presenting some of the foremost scholars in the areas of psychology, culture, neuroscience, and psychiatry. Participating faculty and trainees were members of the UCLA programs in Anthropology, Applied Linguistics, Education, Neuroscience, and Psychology. CBD also offered training that integrates theory and research on culture, brain, and development at both the predoctoral and postdoctoral levels. Participating faculty came from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, psychiatry, and education. The training program included a one-quarter integrative seminar on a different topic each year, and biweekly Forum talks throughout the academic year. CBD also hosted a lecture series consisting of three talks each year by researchers in culture, brain, and development from the United States and around the world.