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By Tara Mahfoud, Ph.D., Lecture (Assistant Professor), Department of Sociology, University of Essex.

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Abstract:

The Human Brain Project (HBP) was launched in October 2013 by the European Commission to build an information and communication technology infrastructure that would support large-scale brain modelling and simulation. Less than a year after its launch, more than 800 neuroscientists signed a letter that claimed the HBP ‘would fail to meet its goals’. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between February 2014 and January 2017 in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the HBP headquarters in Switzerland, and over 40 interviews with scientists, engineers and project administrators, this talk traces how competing visions over how brain models should be built became tied into debates over how scientific communities should be governed. Articulations of these different kinds of models and communities appealed to competing imaginaries of Europe itself – of Europe and European science as unified or pluralistic. I argue that scientific models are sites of contestation over social and political futures. The tensions between visions of scientific unification and pluralism in the HBP mirrored the tensions between imaginaries of European political unification and pluralism.

Bionote:

Tara Mahfoud is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. Before that, Tara was a Research Associate in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Science, Technology and Society programme at Harvard University. Trained in sociology and anthropology, her work explores the intersections between science, technology and medicine. She conducts multi-sited qualitative research on the cultural, social, and political contexts and implications of developments in the neurosciences, primarily in Europe.