Toward a Critical Neuroscience inside and outside the Laboratory: Images, Models and Visualisation Practices

A ‘visual turn’ is taking place within the medical humanities, a field which has, to date, been predominantly dominated by the written or spoken word (Woods, 2011: 73-78). Both medical humanities and visual culture are driven by the awareness that spectatorship is as difficult a conceptual problem as reading, and that visual experience might not be fully comprehensible in the model of textuality (Mitchell, 1994). This project aims at charting and critically assessing the social, political, and ethical conditions of visibility and spectatorship within the field of neurosciences outside the laboratory setting. The “new image of man” offered by neuroscientific discourse becomes increasingly widespread across medicine, education, advertising and various domains of knowledge production. It is through images of the brain and brain scans that the culture and politics of neurosciences becomes visible, solidifies, and spreads across the wider public arena beyond the closed circuit of neuroscientific discourse (Frazzetto and Anker 2009; Ortega and Vidal 2011). The project aims at exploring the ways in which neuroscientific images, models and other forms of visualisation are used and displayed in (for example) textbooks and research papers, public health campaigns, medical museums and art galleries. The objective is to contribute to further developing the project of a critical neuroscience whose goal is the engagement with the material sites, discourses and practices that re-configure the neurosciences in relation to the human lifeworld (Choudhury and Slaby, 2011). Project proposals may focus on (but are not limited to) the following questions: Why and how do certain types of bodies come to be more visible than others? How are patients’ identities constructed and challenged both visually and discoursively outside the laboratory? How do artists explore and engage with images and image-making practices for intervening in the dialogical space between artists, neuroscientists and patients?