The social self: how social interactions shape body and self-representations

An Interdisciplinary Summer School
21 - 27 June 2015, Hotel Apollo, Aegina, Greece

We invite applications from PhD students, post-doc and young researchers to attend the interdisciplinary Summer School on “Shared Experiences: the boundaries of the social brain”, organized by Manos Tsakiris (RHUL), Ophelia Deroy (Centre for the Study of the Senses & Institute of Philosophy, UoL, UK). & Barry Smith ( Institute of Philosophy, UoL, UK).

The Summer School will take place in the Island of Aegina, Greece (approximately 1 hour by boat from Piraeus, the port of Athens), at the wonderful location of the historic Hotel Apollo (http://www.apollohotelaegina.gr/en), from 21 June to 27 June 2015.

The application form can be found at http://philosophy.sas.ac.uk/AeginaSummerSchool2015 Email the completed Application form as one SINGLE word document file with your Surname as file name (e.g. Frith.doc) at [email protected] by Monday 2 March 2014, 5pm GMT.

This Summer School builds upon the success of a previous summer school on the “Embodied Intersubjectivity” and “Shared Experiences” that we organized in Aigina in 2013 and 2014.

-------------------------------

We would like to revisit the question of the importance of social interactions in the shaping of body representation and sense of self. The provisional programme of the school will cover questions such as:

1. How do social interactions shape our sense of self, through development and in adult life?

2. Is there a relation between our attitudes to others (e.g. empathy) and our attitudes to ourselves (e.g, empathy toward oneself)?

3. Do social interactions inuence the sense of our bodily self, and what is the importance of various sensory modalities, and their interactions, in these influences?

4. How should we articulate the relation between clinical disorders and social / interaction disorders?

5. Do different kinds of social interactions (or the lack thereof) affect our sense of self in a different way?

6. Do interactions need to be actual to have this influence or can interactions in virtual reality / fictional worlds also affect our sense of self?

To deliver the state-of-the-art research in these fields, we have invited leading researchers from the fields of experimental, developmental and social psychology, cognitive and social neuroscience, primatology and philosophy.

Salvatore Aglioti (Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy)
Ophelia Deroy (Centre for the Study of the Senses, University of London, UK)
Ruth Feldman (Bar-Ilan University, Israel & Yale School of Medicine, USA)
Katerina Fotopoulou (UCL, UK)
Claus Lamm (University of Vienna, Austria)
Gloria Origgi (CNRS, Paris, France)
Soren Overgaard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Daniel Povinelli (University of Louisianna, USA)
Daniel Richardson (UCL, UK)
Leo Schilbach (University Hospital Cologne, Germany)
Andrea Serino (EPFL, Switzerland)
Mel Slater (University of Barcelona, Spain & UCL, UK)
Barry Smith (Institute of Philosophy, University of London, UK)
Manos Tsakiris (Royal Holloway, UK)