Brain research today attracts acute scientific and public interest. Publications explaining why women and men feel, think, act, or talk differently are increasingly encountered. This practice can turn into an explosive topic when human behavior is directly linked to structures and activities of the brain.
In this talk, Anelis Kaiser Trujillo aimed to present and discuss how sex/gender is categorized, treated, measured and discovered in (f)MRI studies, i.e., in studies that look at how women and men differ in structure and function of the brain. Central to her research is a transdisciplinary background in neuroscience and gender studies. While in neuroscience gender is a hard variable, in gender studies it is a social phenomenon, a result and a facet of human action and social structures––in short: a social construct. Kaiser Trujillo’s aim is to bridge the divide between these two epistemologically different approaches.
Anelis Kaiser Trujillo is Professor for Gender Studies in MINT, University of Freiburg, Winner of the Emma Goldman Award 2021. She was IWM Visiting Fellow at the Emma Goldman Program.
Research Director of IWM´s program Eurasia in Global Dialogue Clemena Antonova provided the commentary.
