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- Convenors:
-
Andrew Brown
(University of Edinburgh)
Tamara Pascale Schwertel (University clinic Koeln)
Martyn Pickersgill (University of Edinburgh)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Neurotech innovations seem to be accelerating. Given STS is increasingly embroiled in technoscience not only as a critic but also a collaborator, how can – and should - STS respond to and intervene in neurotech? This panel seeks to explore strategies of discursive and material intervention.
Description
“Neuralink, Elon Musk, and the Race to Put Chips into Our Brains” (Loucaides 2025) is one of many news headlines signaling the rising interest in neurotechnology among Big Tech, investors, the military, policymakers, and the wider public. Implantable neural devices, for instance, are often touted as having the potential to revolutionize neurological treatment of mobility impairments, communications disorders, and mental ill-health impairment. Wearable neurotechnologies are gaining traction too, with purportedly attention-tracking and modulating devices entangling seemingly ‘new’ and ‘old’ approaches to visualizing and stimulating the neurological. Much discourse around neurotechnology—in funding calls, scientific publications, neuroethics, the media, and beyond—promotes promissory narratives of sociotechnical novelty, alongside a range of cautions and more hyperbolic concerns. Over the last quarter century especially, STS has engaged with neurotechnology in wideranging ways, not least through careful critique of such positive hype and negative expectations. Yet, as neurotechnologies and the discursive and material contexts through which they are constituted continue to morph, are different modalities of engagement required? How, today, should STS respond and intervene in neurotechnology? Given STS is increasingly embroiled in technoscience not only as a critic but also a collaborator, how might we enact critical interventions which nevertheless remain hopeful that socially robust, democratically accountable innovation could still be possible? This panel will explore the range of strategies of intervention that STS scholars have deployed and could advance to reckon with—and shape—emerging neurotechnology. We invite papers drawing on a wide range of prospective theoretical approaches including, but certainly not limited to: analytics of (neuro)technological subjectification (Brenninkmeijer 2016); social studies of expectations (Martin 2015); and the sociology of novelty (Pickersgill 2019).
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Chronic neural implant trials raise complex questions about how post-trial responsibilities are negotiated. Drawing on embedded research in an invasive BCI study, this paper analyzes exit as a socio-technical process and shows how STS engagement can intervene in designing responsible exit practices.
Paper long abstract
The development of chronic brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is reshaping the landscape of translational neuroscience. While considerable attention has been devoted to questions of recruitment, consent, and risk management in early-stage implant trials, the moment when studies end, i.e., when research participation concludes and responsibility for implanted devices must be renegotiated, remains comparatively underexamined.
Drawing on two years of embedded empirical research in an invasive BCI study within the TUM Innovation Network for Neurotechnology in Mental Health (NEUROTECH), this paper examines how questions of exit emerge, are negotiated, and sometimes deferred in the everyday conduct of implant research. In doing so, we show how “exit” emerges not as a clear procedural endpoint but as a socio-technical problem distributed across relationships, institutions, and temporal infrastructures. Researchers must navigate tensions between experimental goals and care relationships, uncertainties around device maintenance and funding continuity, and the absence of institutional structures governing post-trial responsibilities.
Analyzing exit as an empirical site of coordination reveals how ethical and governance challenges in neurotechnology are not simply matters of normative principle but emerge through the practical alignment of people, devices, organizations, and timelines. At the same time, we demonstrate how STS engagement can function as a form of intervention by translating empirical insights into actionable design principles for responsible research practice. By focusing on the end of implant studies, the paper contributes to ongoing STS discussions about how scholars might critically engage with – and potentially shape – the governance of emerging neurotechnologies.
Paper short abstract
The proposed presentation examines how STS can move beyond critique by studying socio-technical imaginaries of AI-driven neurotechnologies and approaching their ethics as discursive, performative, and sensitized by Critical Disability Studies
Paper long abstract
Emerging Neurotechnologies are often accompanied by powerful promissory narratives that frame brain implants as “tools” for overcoming human biological limits. High-profile interventions by figures such as Elon Musk, who claims that Neuralink is the first step for enabling a merger of human and AI, reproduce transhumanist imaginaries in which the human body is depicted as inherently deficient and in need of technological transcendence. AI-driven brain implants, such as adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation (aDBS) and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), support daily life for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses while raising further questions as they move into consumer and enhancement domains.
The proposed presentation explores how STS can move beyond critique to examine the socio-technical imaginaries surrounding emerging neurotechnologies. Drawing on STS and sensitized by insights from Critical Disability Studies (CDS), it approaches ethics of imaginaries as discursive and performative work; ethical concerns are enacted through language, framing, and rhetorical strategies that shape what counts as a problem, which values are prioritized, and where responsibility lies (Martin 2015; Wehrens et al., 2023). Building on this perspective, this presentation focusing on imaginaries, examining how transhumanist narratives often intensify ableist assumptions by extending the medical model of disability and framing disability primarily as a biological deficit to be technologically corrected or transcended. This approach demonstrates that critically engaging with these imaginaries can itself function as a form of STS intervention, informed by insights from CDS in the context of emerging AI-enabled neurotechnologies.
Paper short abstract
Neural stimulators for mental health—from vagus nerve devices to deep brain stimulation—are rapidly proliferating. Emerging closed-loop systems promise to detect and modulate neural states in real time. This paper explores how STS can intervene in this emerging technoscientific project.
Paper long abstract
What is happiness? Across philosophy, biomedicine, psychology and other disciplines, happiness has been understood and measured in different ways: as pleasure, flourishing, neurological states, or life satisfaction. Against a global backdrop of intersecting crises in mental health, pharmacological dependencies and side-effects, and stretched healthcare systems, neurotechnologies are increasingly seeking to intervene directly in the biological and affective processes through which human experience is produced.
A growing range of neural stimulation technologies are now being developed and marketed to address wellbeing. These include transcranial stimulation devices, vagus nerve stimulators, and deep brain stimulation systems operating across healthcare and commercial markets. Electrical stimulation has long been harnessed therapeutically—from the use of electric fish in ancient medicine to twentieth-century electroconvulsive therapies—yet contemporary neurotechnologies are beginning to pursue a new technical paradigm.
Research groups and companies developing closed-loop neurostimulation systems combine biosensing, algorithmic interpretation, and targeted stimulation in adaptive feedback cycles. Rather than delivering fixed therapeutic interventions, these systems aim to detect and respond to neural states in real time.
This paper examines these developments through the figure of the “happy cyborg”—an emerging sociotechnical configuration in which wellbeing becomes an object of continuous technological modulation. Anchored in the critical posthumanities, the analysis foregrounds biohybrid (human–technology) assemblages while asking how technological efforts to modulate moods interact with ideas of flourishing, identity, and biopolitics. Drawing on the proposed humanities-led project Augmented Wellbeing, the paper explores how historic, ethnographic and speculative STS approaches might be combined to intervene in the development and governance of closed-loop neurotechnologies.
Paper short abstract
This presentation examines how the legitimacy of invasive neurotechnologies in psychiatry is negotiated in Germany. Focusing on deep brain stimulation, it explores how these debates shape understandings of psychiatric conditions and their potential treatability.
Paper long abstract
The ethical evaluation and clinical legitimacy of invasive neurotechnologies vary significantly across medical conditions. While invasive procedures such as temporal lobe resection have become established treatments for neurological disorders like epilepsy, comparable interventions for psychiatric conditions are today hardly conceivable as legitimate therapeutic options. As neurotechnologies continue to expand, questions of legitimacy and appropriate fields of application have therefore become central to debates surrounding their use, particularly when psychiatric conditions are concerned. Focusing on Germany, I trace how different actors have framed and negotiated the role of invasive neurotechnologies in the treatment of psychiatric conditions. The analysis draws on a situational analysis of heterogeneous materials, including historical documents, policy papers, interviews, and ethnographic fieldnotes.
The presentation outlines key moments in the development of invasive neurotechnologies and reconstructs positions that have emerged over time. Building on this, I focus on deep brain stimulation (DBS) as a case in the treatment of psychiatric conditions. Rather than following a linear trajectory of stabilisation, the development of DBS has been characterised by shifting expectations, controversies, and optimism and setback. The presentation therefore examines how DBS has been framed as an experimental intervention, a promising therapeutic option, or a contested treatment pathway. Attention is paid to how actors (clinicians, technology developers, psychiatrists, and patient organisations) have positioned themselves towards the use of DBS for psychiatric conditions. The presentation concludes by reflecting on how neurotechnologies contribute to understandings of psychiatric conditions and expectations regarding their potential treatability.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the role of STS collaboration in the development of neurotechnology using VR/AR systems that monitor users’ neuroadaptive states for task-relevant information. It furthermore reflects on STS researchers’ roles and the political context shaping the affordances of interventions.
Paper long abstract
Neurotechnology has been met with both techno optimistic enthusiasm and critical hesitation. From an STS point of view, emerging technologies—and the ways in which they are received by various groups in society—constitute an object of study in their own right. In line with earlier technoscientific developments, neurotechnology opens yet another chapter in the longstanding STS scholarship. Some of this work has been carried out from the vantage point of an allegedly disengaged observer, while a second strand of research has taken place in collaborative settings.
Contemporary funding schemes require research consortia to include an SSH perspective in their proposed projects. Such mandatory inclusion is itself a science policy intervention. In this paper, we present this type of research collaboration in the context of advanced neurotechnology. Our project focuses on the combined deployment of immersive VR training with AR based real world assistance, continuously monitoring performance and physiological signals to infer the neuroadaptive states of its users. These technologies raise questions of workplace surveillance and the hybridization of work (Levy 2023), due to the detection of cognitive states such as workload, uncertainty, and error awareness. Specific to this research is the integration of neurophysiological data with machine learning methods aimed at providing real time immersion in task relevant information.
Building on earlier work, this paper reflects on how STS researchers negotiate their positioning between collaborative proximity and scholarly autonomy. We conclude by considering the broader political landscape that shapes the ways in which such affordances for intervention can be negotiated.
Paper short abstract
Virtual reality (VR) is gaining legitimacy in Danish psychiatry, moving from niche consumer technology to clinical tool. Drawing on two empirical studies, we show how VR is framed as a solution to mental health challenges and creates a device-centred community of promise around innovation and care.
Paper long abstract
Psychiatry has become a space for digital experimentation and clinical innovation, giving rise to what has been described as a new "neuro-digital complex" (De La Fabián et al. 2023). Unlike other medical subdisciplines, psychiatric treatment and screening are not necessarily dependent on physical presence, making the field particularly open to technologies that alter the spatial and bodily dynamics of therapy. One of these digital technologies is Virtual reality (VR), which displaces interaction from physical into immersive, digital environments. It is increasingly promoted as promising for mental health care as it enables novel forms of screening, treatment and therapeutic interaction in and beyond the clinic. In Denmark, frequently described as one of the most digitalised countries globally (Winthereik et al. 2024), VR is now the object of major clinical trials and increasingly implemented. In this presentation, we draw on two empirical projects exploring different modes of VR use within Danish psychiatry, and examine how this once-marginal device has gained legitimacy and prominence in visions and practices of psychiatric care. We argue that VR’s movement from niche consumer device to psychiatric tool is not simply a story of technological transfer. Rather, it reflects how digital technologies are articulated as solutions to specific mental health problems, while devices themselves participate in shaping new constellations of policy, clinical practice, and technological development. The device brings together heterogeneous actors and expectations around innovation, care, and the future of psychiatric treatment, thereby creating what we conceptualise as a device-centred “community of promise” (Martin et al. 2008).
Paper short abstract
Drawing on interviews with deaf professionals who use cochlear implants, this paper asks how STS studies of neurotechnology can foreground lived sensory experience. It asks whether clinicians listen to CI users and how user expertise might reshape how neurotechnologies are assessed and understood.
Paper long abstract
Implantable neurotechnologies are increasingly framed through promissory narratives that emphasize technical innovation and therapeutic potential. Within this landscape, cochlear implants (CIs) occupy a longer-standing yet still evolving position as devices that mediate sensory experience, identity, and social life. Research in audiology has identified a persistent gap between clinical metrics and the realities of functional communication in everyday contexts. This presentation examines how expertise of CI users could address this gap.
We draw on a dataset of 54 semi-structured interviews with hearing professionals and deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, focusing on a subset of Australian deaf professionals (n=5) who work with deaf communities. Positioned simultaneously as CI users, deaf individuals, and professionals, these participants provide unique reflections on how deafness and CI use are experienced and interpreted across personal and professional domains.
We identify four key themes: (1) the multiplicity of sensory experience; (2) critical engagement with prevailing models of disability; (3) the emotional and psychological dimensions of deafness and CI use; and (4) the social and environmental nature of sonic experience. Participants’ accounts foreground forms of listening, embodiment, and social interaction that extend beyond the hearing-focused metrics that dominate clinical and scientific discourse.
Overall, this paper will focus on how STS discussions of neurotechnological subjectification and the sociology of novelty. It asks how STS-informed engagement with neurotechnology might foreground lived sensory experience and encourage professionals to reflect critically on a central question: when working with neurotechnologies, are we truly hearing—or listening to—device users’ experiences?
Paper short abstract
The profession of neurology in the UK is changing, at the same time as innovations in its professional tools – most visibly, neurotechnologies – are occurring. We consider two imaginaries of neurology, and parse how these might imply very different futures for integrating neurotech into healthcare.
Paper long abstract
In the UK, optimism around promising therapies for neurological conditions is now longstanding, and continues to grow – including within the profession of neurology. At the same time, some neurological associations appear far more concerned about staffing, (over-)specialisation, and the economics of the UK National Health Service (NHS) than with technological innovation per se. We can see, then, that at least two semiotic configurations of the potential for neurotechnology to enhance practice are emerging, and which exist in friction with one another. Within the first, neurologists and their patients should be celebrating: neurotechnologies are being innovated to enhance diagnostic capabilities, speed up clinical practice, lessen the burden on healthcare professionals, and improve patient care. While this configuration acknowledges there may be what is termed ‘resistance’ to new technologies, the NHS is nevertheless characterised as a natural home for neurotech. In the second configuration, however, technological innovation is regarded as almost a distraction from clinical exigencies and even more existential considerations about the future of neurology as a distinct profession. Our provocation is that a third configuration seems discernible, and that as STS scholars we might even actively support it to flourish. In it, the relationality between neurology and neurotech involves reflexive hope tempered by realism and pragmatism – yet not overt pessimism – of innovative futures. Within this configuration, not only might the NHS affiliate with technological advances but innovation pathways too could be more effectively moulded through clinical and patient insight.