Suparna Choudhury is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University,听Co-director of the Culture, Mind, and Brain Program, McGill University,听and an Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. She did her doctoral research in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, postdoctoral research in transcultural psychiatry at McGill and most recently directed an interdisciplinary research program on critical neuroscience and the developing brain at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin.听Her current work investigates the production and dissemination of biomedical knowledge 鈥� in particular cognitive neuroscience 鈥� that shapes the ways in which researchers, clinicians, patients and laypeople understand themselves, their mental health and their illness experiences. Dr Choudhury鈥檚 research focuses primarily on the cases of the adolescent brain, cultural neuroscience and personalized genomic medicine. Her research investigates (i) How biological knowledge with significant social and clinical impact is produced. This line of research has focused mainly on the models, methodologies and disciplinary intersections in developmental cognitive neuroscience labs that work on the 鈥渢eenage brain鈥�. (ii) How this knowledge circulates and how it is it taken up, applied or resisted. This looks at how brain research informs mental health policy trans-nationally, how the language of genomics and neuroscience is interpreted by patient communities and lay users, and how these sciences shape everyday practices outside scientific research from education to meditation (iii) Social and political contexts of cognitive neuroscience, and interdisciplinary approaches to brain research through the framework of critical neuroscience.
Selected Articles
Choudhury, S., Fishman, J., McGowan, M. & Juengst, E. (2014). Big data, open science and the brain: lessons learned from genomics. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8:239. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00239
Choudhury S. & Sanchez-Allred. A. (2014). To speak for human nature: Cosmopolitics, critique, and the neurosciences. BioSocieties, 9: 104-109
Choudhury, S., McKinney, K.A. (2013). Digital media, the developing brain and the interpretive plasticity of neuroplasticity. Transcultural Psychiatry, 50: 192-215.
Choudhury, S., McKinney, K.A. & Merten, M. (2012). Rebelling against the brain: public engagement with the 'neurological adolescent'. Social Science & Medicine, 74, 4, 565-573
Ortega, F., & Choudhury, S. (2011). 鈥淲ired up differently鈥�: Autism, adolescence and neurological identities, Subjectivity, in press.
Choudhury, S., Gold, I., & Kirmayer, L. (2010). From brain image to the Bush doctrine: Critical neuroscience and the political uses of neurotechnology. American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience, 1(2), 17-19.
Choudhury, S., & Kirmayer, L. (2010). Cultural neuroscience and psychopathology: Prospects for cultural psychiatry. Progress in Brain Research, 178, 263-83.
Choudhury, S. (2009). Culturing the adolescent brain: What can neuroscience learn from anthropology? Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, 5(2-3), 159-167.
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Selected Books and Book Chapters
Seligman R. Choudhury S. & Kirmayer L.J. (in press) Locating culture in the brain and in the world: From social categories to the ecology of mind. Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience (Oxford University Press)
Choudhury, S.,听& Slaby, J. (Eds.). (2012).听Critical neuroscience: A handbook of the social and cultural contexts of neuroscience.听Wiley: Blackwell.
Ebensperger, L.听Choudhury, S.,听& Slaby, J. (2011). Designing the lifeworld: Selfhood as an architectural project. In D. Hauptmann, & W. Neidich (Eds.),听Cognitive Architecture. From bio-politics to noo-politics. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
Slaby, J., & Haueis, P., &听Choudhury, S.听(2011). Neuroscience as applied hermeneutics: Towards a critical neuroscience of political theory. In F. Vandervalk (Ed.),听Neuroscience & Political Theory. UK: Routledge.
Choudhury, S.,听Charman, T., & Blakemore, S. J. (2009). Mentalizing and development during adolescence.听In M. De Haan, & M. R. Gunnar (Eds.),听Handbook of developmental social neuroscience听(pp. 159-174). Guilford, UK: The Guilford Press.