A Brain for Europe
Big Science, Big Models, and the Politics of Unification
$190.17
- Paperback
232 pages
- Release Date
15 December 2026
Summary
The Human Brain Project was launched by the European Commission in 2013 to build a digital research infrastructure that scientists across the world could use to unify neuroscientific knowledge. One of its goals was to build a detailed, large-scale model and simulation of the human brain. But less than a year after its launch, hundreds of scientists signed a letter that questioned the project’s governance and the feasibility of its scientific goals. Launched with the intention of unifying the …
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262054645 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0262054647 |
| Author: | Tara Mahfoud |
| Publisher: | MIT Press Ltd |
| Imprint: | MIT Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 232 |
| Release Date: | 15 December 2026 |
| Weight: | 369g |
| Dimensions: | 152mm x 229mm |
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Critics Review
ENDORSEMENTS
“Mahfoud’s ethnographic account of the Human Brain Project beautifully illuminates the normative conflicts entangled in ways of knowing ‘the’ brain and ways of shaping ‘a’ scientific community.”
—Stephen Hilgartner, author of Reordering Life
“Mahfoud provides an enthralling view of how computational models could drive a thoroughly pluralistic science—with its multitudes of organisms, methods, and perspectives—and with it, a European understanding of human cognition.”
—Sabina Leonelli, author of Data-Centric Biology and Philosophy of Open Science
“Ostensibly about representationalism in and via models, Mahfoud unearths, wonderfully, an epistemology of agonism—revealing how the European Enlightenment’s proceduralism, which powers and constrains European politics, may also undo its grandest projects.”
—Mark Dennis Robinson, author of The Market in Mind
Tara Mahfoud
Tara Mahfoud is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Essex. She has also held Visiting Fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Edinburgh.
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