Performing Science and Medicine

October 27, 6–7:30 pm CET

 

The Dramaturgy of Personhood in Social Cognition Experiments

Yelena Gluzman (University of Alberta)

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Do experiments on intersubjectivity, as have been conducted in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience research, attend to or bracket out the conditions that animate and situate their enactment? This talk examines the dramaturgy of laboratory experiments on non-normative or "other" minds, drawing out a distinction between those dramaturgies that rely on theater versus those that take up experimental theater, a 20th century movement characterized by theater performances that resist suspension of disbelief and the vanishing proscenium by dramatizing their own conditions of production. So, while theater is constitutive of traditional experimental design in psychology and cognitive neuroscience laboratory practice, this talk argues that social cognition experiments can resist reinscribing harmful normativities by taking up and cultivating the methodologics of experimental theater.

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Yelena Gluzman is an Assistant Professor in Science, Technology and Society (STS), co-appointed between Media and Technology Studies and the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, in Canada. She draws on her background of making experimental theater to theorize and experiment with ways of knowing at multiple sites: in the cognitive neuroscience lab, in access work and criptech, and in collaborative projects that bring together disparate disciplines, methods and worldviews. She has written extensively on research-creation, interdisciplinarity and reflexivity. Recently, her experimental ethnographic film on real-time captioning for d/Deaf and Hard-of-hearing students, Invisible Machines, received a number of awards, including the 2025 Making and Doing Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science.