Entries by Constance Cummings
McGill’s Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives Initiative: Integrating Social Context into Neuroscience Research
By Constance A. Cummings, FPR Project Director In a recent collection of essays, anthropologist Gisli Palsson suggested we’re on the verge of a “post-disciplinary” era of academic collaboration (Palsson, 2015). Signs were very much in evidence at an inaugural workshop exploring ways to integrate social context in neuroscience research at McGill University on June 6–7, […]
FPR Sex/Gender Conference Summary: Part 3 – What Counts as Adequate Function?
The sex/gender conference succeeded in bringing together people “with different ideas and skills, different ways of thinking, that are actually transforming the field,” observed Carol Worthman, chair of Part 3 (“What’s at Stake?”). The earlier sessions (see Parts 1 and 2) provided us with a better sense of the complexities of sex/gender; we also learned […]
FPR Sex/Gender Conference Summary: Part 2 – What’s Fixed, Changing, Changeable
Part 2 of the FPR-UCLA conference on sex/gender, which was chaired by cultural anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, explored aspects of brain and behavior that are “fixed” by evolution and biology and other aspects that create, reflect, and respond to human social and cultural environments. Speakers in the first session addressed, in Darwin’s phrase, the “entangled bank” […]
FPR Sex/Gender Conference Summary: Part I – Why Now?
Emerging theories in neuroscience – fueled by new technologies in brain imaging and recording along with torrents of new data – offer a profoundly different view of the human brain – part of a “tangled skein” of extended brain-body-behavior networks that are dynamic, plastic, adaptable, and “in constant dialog” with the environment (Rebeiz, Patel, & […]
FPR-Related Organizations
FPR-Hampshire College Culture, Brain, and Development Program