Jacob Strandell forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling ved Sociologisk Institut

Kandidat
Jacob Strandell

Titel
“Culture-Cognition Interaction: Bridging cognitive science and cultural sociology“. Forud for forsvaret ligger en papirudgave af afhandlingen til gennemsyn på Sociologisk Institut, lokale 16.1.23.

Tid og sted
Den 7. juni 2017, kl. 13. Københavns Universitet, Det Samfundsvidenskabelige Fakultetsbibliotek, Gothersgade 140, 1353 Copenhagen K, Auditorium 1. Efter forsvaret er Sociologisk Institut vært ved en reception i lokale 16.1.62 (kl. ca. 16).

Bedømmelsesudvalg

• Lektor Mikael Carleheden, Sociologisk Institut, Københavns Universitet (formand)
• Associate professor Karen Danna, Department of Sociology, Economics & Anthropology, County College of Morris, USA
• Professor Andreas Roepstorff, Institut for Kultur og Samfund, Aarhus Universite

Resumé
Only in the last few decades have we begun to understand just how efficiently the human brain adapts to its environments. Through activity-dependent neuroplasticity, the brain continuously restructures its neural connections in response to everything we experience. Insights such as this from the cognitive sciences have raised the importance of culture to a previously unprecedented level: if our brain adapts to culturally structured experiences, culture physically shapes the human brain. The need for understanding culture-cognition interaction have never been greater. However, despite great insights in both cognitive science and cultural sociology, a misperceived incompatibility between the two disciplines, caused by dissociated conceptual vocabularies, have long kept them from seriously taking each other. The future of social science requires a move towards greater interdisciplinary compatibility to develop an integrated vertical model of how culture and cognition interacts.   This dissertation shows that cognitive science and cultural sociology can be fruitfully bridged if we can efficiently translate their frameworks and show how the two disciplines actually confirm and support each other. I show this through four papers: two broad conceptualization papers, and two papers where a culture-cognition interaction perspective is applied in two concrete fields of research. Together the papers of this dissertation show that there is substantial common ground for an integration of cultural sociology and cognitive science, and that there is much to gain from doing so. With sufficient conceptual translation work it is possible to develop the frameworks necessary for truly interdisciplinary vertical models of human action, connecting neuroscience to large-scale cultural phenomena.