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Podcast: New Books in Human Rights
Episode: Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, "Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
Description: Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood.Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rat...