Please join the HASS Science and Technology Studies Department on Wednesday, April 3rd at 11:30 in Sage Labs, room 5711, to listen to guest speaker Denielle Elliott, PhD, Associate professor of socio-cultural anthropology at York University, York Research Chair in Injured Minds. Deputy-Director of the Institute for Technoscience and Society. Her current research explores the embodied experience of people living with altered neuro states and knowledge-making practices in the clinic, laboratory, and neuro-tech industry, and their convergences.

A nervous system: Neurological conditions, political anxieties, and science fictions

In 2017 American and Canadian embassy staff workers in Havana, Cuba reported hearing strange sounds that they understood were resulting in unusual sensory events that they were experiencing - headaches, dizziness, ear pain, vertigo, and cognitive problems. In the seven years since the first reports, there have been additional claims from other embassy locations globally and a range of government-led reports examining what the sounds were and how they could cause “physiological brain injuries.” The “Havana Syndrome” emerged as a deeply contested series of events – simultaneously political, sonic, ecological, military, and embodied. In this paper I explore the neurological condition and the multiple, shifting, political contexts in Cuba and the US as a complex interconnected nervous system, mutually agitated and hyper-vigilant, of body and state.

Denielle Elliott, PhD, is an Associate Professor of socio-cultural anthropology at York University, where she holds a York Research Chair in Injured Minds. She is also the Deputy-Director of the Institute for Technoscience and Society. Her current research explores the embodied experience of people living with altered neuro states and knowledge-making practices in the clinic, laboratory, and neuro-tech industry, and their convergences.