Nikolas Rose

Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Kings College London.  Before joining King’s in 2012, he was Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Head of the Department of Sociology from 2002 to 2006, and Director of the LSE's BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, which he founded in 2003 He is founder and co-editor of BioSocieties: an interdisciplinary journal for social studies of the life sciences. has published widely on the social and political history of the human sciences, on the genealogy of subjectivity, on the history of empirical thought in sociology, on law and criminology, and on changing rationalities and techniques of political power. His most recent books include books The Politics of Life Itself : Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (2006) Governing The Present (written with Peter Miller, 2008) and Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (written with Joelle Abi-Rached, 2013). 

Presentation Abstract

From Social Studies of Medicine to Social Science in Medicine?
Researching the neurosocial city

Over the last half century, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and other scholars from the social sciences have described and analysed the institutional, cultural, and technological shaping of medical knowledge and practices.  In this paper, without doubting the worth of those invaluable studies, I want to advocate a different, perhaps complementary, role for the social sciences - one in which we use all our sophisticated conceptual, methodological and analytical skills to work with our colleagues in biomedicine to better understand how conditions of social adversity get under the skin of human beings, individually and collectively, to shape, and often to scar, bodies and souls.  Drawing on my own recent research on the relations between the metropolis and mental life, which focuses on the megacities of Shanghai and Sao Paolo, and building on concepts of ‘local biologies’, I suggest that, if we are to counter the often unreflective mechanistic ambitions of much research in biomedicine,  we need to go beyond describing the social determinants of ill health, to develop a ‘vitalist’ social science that can address the mechanisms through which adversity marks human corporeal and cerebral existence, and, in doing so, to demonstrate that the social sciences are fundamental sciences in understanding individual and collective disease and health.

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