The Psy-ences Project is a regional seminar, launched by Elizabeth Lunbeck (History, Princeton), Emily Martin (Anthropology, NYU), and Louis Sass (Clinical Psychology, Rutgers), that will provide a venue for scholars--from graduate students to professors to practitioners -- concerned with the emergence and social influence of such disciplines as psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychopharmacology. Scattered across the disciplines (history, anthropology, literature, sociology, science studies, legal studies, psychology and psychiatry) and dispersed among the area's institutions, such scholars have at present no forum in which to address their common interests. Our hope is that The Psy-ences Project will foster communication and scholarly exchange among researchers in this increasingly culturally potent area.
Visit the Psy-ences Project website.
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This initiative has developed as a product of a class taught by Emily Martin in the spring of 2002 titled “Cultures of the Mental,” that explored contemporary cultural meanings attached to mental phenomena through historical analyses of mental illness and its treatment; consideration of the mind/body problem in light of new research on brain structure and function; examination of everyday concepts of mental functions, health, and illness and ethnographic studies of mental illness in the U.S. and other cultural settings. Graduate students from NYU departments of psychology, anthropology, and the School of Social Work, Columbia University, The New School, and faculty from the department of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine attended the course. The group has continued to meet periodically, to read each other’s work in progress. Funding is currently being sought for future meetings of the working group. In 2003-2004 the group plans to include additional interested scholars from Cambridge, New York, New Brunswick, Princeton, and Baltimore.
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This project aims to undertake a reexamination of the nature/culture dichotomy in terms of models of evolution, concepts of culture in anthropology, and recent research on the social life of non-human primates and other animals. This emerging focus will initially be addressed in a course to be taught jointly between IHPK and the NYU Department of Anthropology by professors Emily Martin and Bambi Scheiffelin in the fall of 2003. The course will serve as a launch pad from which to build an ongoing series of lectures and joint publications.
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The New York Consortium on Science and Society is an inter-disciplinary group of scholars, researchers and writers interested in bringing to bear their knowledge and expertise on particular aspects of the science-society relationship, especially the interface between fast-moving developments in the biosciences and their social implications. Monthly meetings, convened by Troy Duster, are organized around a theme, often with a brief presentation by an invited speaker. The Consortium's membership is drawn from persons in institutions located in the greater New York metropolitan area, and includes members from Columbia, the Graduate Center, CUNY Queens, the Gene-Media Forum, and the Sencer Group of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The Consortium is supported in part by a grant from the Ford Foundation. More information on past meetings can be found in the Events section of this website.
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This initiative, led by Troy Duster, enhances exchange, dialogue and scholarship to narrow the gap between multiple public understandings of developments in human genetics by promoting more substantive discussions of ethical and social issues regarding new technologies. It aims to increase the ability of South African institutions, both academic and community-based (interface), to provide an important and needed consultative role promoting "science in relation to society" via multi-disciplinary methods of addressing contemporary social problems - most specifically the AIDS crisis.
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Culture Matters, an online anthropology magazine, is the brainchild of a small group of anthropologists, including Emily Martin, who have been working to establish an online “popular anthropology” magazine which would address the gap between popular news coverage of developments in anthropology and the more specialized treatment given to those developments in professional journals. Significant progress has been made on this initiative and the website is currently under review by a leading academic publishing house. The debut issue of Culture Matters can be viewed online at http://www.nyu.edu/fas/ihpk/CultureMatters/index2.htm.
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In this research project, Emily Martin seeks to describe and understand a shift that is taking place in the way certain mental conditions are being represented in both popular culture and technical literature. The conditions under consideration in this study centrally involve lability or continuous shifting in time and space, either emotionally or cognitively. This study has been funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
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Utilizing an ethnographic approach, this study aims to describe and understand a shift that is taking place in the way certain mental conditions are being represented in popular culture, scientific research, and major social institutions such as schools and the workplace. The conditions under consideration in this study centrally involve continuous shifting of the self in time ans space, a kind of existential lability, either emotionally or cognitively. This shift has implications for what are held to be desirable goals for the educational system, management in the workplace, as well as for how certain mental disorders are being understood, treated and managed. This study has been funded in part by the Spencer Foundation.
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E. Bowman
Institute for the History of the Production
of Knowledge
Faculty of Arts and Science, New York University
© 2003 All Rights Reserved
Originally posted: 04/23/2003
Last updated: 04/08/2005