Editorial: Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research in the Field of Critical (Sex/Gender) Neuroscience

There is currently widespread agreement among scholars that neuroscientific investigations that purport to delineate sexand gender-related structural and functional brain differences urgently require conceptual critique, methodological nuance and thorough reflexivity about the research questions, operationalization, interpretations and implications shaping this scholarship (Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Fine, 2010; Jordan Young, 2010; Roy, 2012). In response to this need, the seven articles in this collection demonstrate new avenues in critical interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of sex/gender and neuroscience research, including approaches that draw on feminist science studies and critical neuroscience. Since the first publications that show how social and cultural values pervade the formulation of biological research on sex and gender, enormous developments have also occurred in the neurosciences, with increased evidence from functional neuroimaging and epigenetics pointing to the context-sensitivity and contingencies of brain development and function. This underscores the imperative for researchers to consider carefully their treatment of difference and of their conceptions of complexity and diversity. It is clear that we need to work out how to collaborate across epistemic boundaries, how to refine and draw on social theory to make sense of brain findings and how together this can inform interpretation of experimental data, data that bear relevance to the real world. This Frontiers research topic builds on a key insight by critical feminist scholars: to arrive at a critical and more socially just production of knowledge about human behaviour it is important to go beyond the split between second order and first order observations, i.e., between critical sociological observations about neuroscientific practice and experimental investigations of the brain. Investigating and responding (to) this goal, the studies in this collection show how, in varying ways, scientific disciplines newly interact andmay also clash in the formation of new conceptualizations of the relation between gender, sex and the material brain. The collection thus contributes to a better understanding of interor multi-disciplinary relations necessary to advance a study of the brain and human behaviour that is crucially informed by a feminist agenda. Moreover, improving our knowledge of (inter-)disciplinary epistemic dynamics by means of the specific case studies in this collection also offers background to an ongoing discussion about how to realize intersectional research. The past 2 decades saw the emergence of a number of sub-(inter-)disciplinary labels and scholarly networks such as “critical neuroscience” (Choudhury and Jan, 2012, Kirmayer and Crafa, 2014), “neurofeminism” (Roy, 2008; Bluhm et al., 2012; Schmitz and Höppner, 2014), “neurogenderings” (Dussauge and Kaiser, 2012; Fitsch, 2012) and “neurocultures” (Schmitz and Höppner, 2014; Vidal and Ortega, 2018), as examples of the heterogeneous bodies of knowledge and gatherings of scholarship (sometimes converging, sometimes conflicting) that aim to analyse fundamental Edited and reviewed by: Kath Woodward, The Open University, United Kingdom