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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).