Johanna Pokorny

Johanna Pokorny is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis, which is situated at the intersection of anthropology and science studies, follows the laboratory life and knowledge production practices of a group of neuroscientists studying the self in the brain, and how their research participates in shifts in contemporary scientific notions of personhood, knowledge, and the body in North America. As the popularity of the neurosciences has increased over the past two decades, the neurosciences have become a dominant scientific framework through which to query the human. But recent changes complicate this, as with neuroplasticity, the embeddedness of the brain in its surrounds and more embodied and dynamic models of the brain are proposed and taken up by researchers. Johanna’s project focuses on a group of neuroscientists that use a variety of neuroscientific imaging and experimental techniques and claim to theorize a dynamic, embodied, cultural self in the brain. She argues that this neuroscientific knowledge production is a project in self-fashioning both as a scientific fact but also a lived reality for the scientists doing the scientific work. In other words, neuroscientists draw on and entangle themselves in neurological matters, living and becoming the embodied, dynamic brains that they study, speaking to wider issues of the lively material, ethical, and imaginary practices of doing science.