Melissa Littlefield is a professor of English, whose interests include sociotechnical studies, “the body” and culture. She has written about the cultural concept and consequences of technologies such as lie detectors, MRI, and EEG.
"Neuro Cultures, Inside and Outside the Laboratory"
Abstract: The neurosciences are inherently interdisciplinary. Perhaps that is one of the reasons they attract so much attention, harness so much cultural—and literal—capital, and invite both collaborators and critics into their midst. In this presentation, Melissa Littlefield speaks about what it is like to work within the neurosciences and alongside neuroscientists, while also often standing apart as a transdisciplinary commentator. Drawing from her recent work, Instrumental Intimacy: EEG Wearables and Neuroscientific Control, she will also discuss what happens to neuroscientific technologies, such as EEG, when they leave the academic laboratory for consumer markets.
About the Speaker: Melissa M. Littlefield is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Technology and the Writing Studies Program. Her research focuses on contemporary and historical intersections between neuroscientific technologies, science fiction, and popular media. Her first book, The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction, is a socio-cultural history of mechanical lie detection and its relationship to the emergent, neuroscientific research on the neural correlates of deception. Littlefield is also the co-editor (with Jenell Johnson) of The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain. Her second book, Instrumental Intimacy: EEG Wearables and Neuroscientific Control concerns the emergence of mobile, user-centered EEG devices and the popular and scientific discourses that fuel their distribution and use.
