From Mumbai to Manchester: the differing impacts of urban living

New research by the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine (SSHM) will examine how experiences of urban living shape the human body and brain. The 18-month project led by Nik Rose, Professor of Sociology and Head of SSHM, is among 21 successful proposals awarded funding by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The ESRC's panel agreed that the project - A New Sociology for a New Century: Transforming the Relations between Sociology and Neuroscience, through a Study of Mental Life and The City - would 'address the important link between the social and life sciences.' The new 'brain sciences' - neuroscience and neurogenetics - have proposed new ways to think about the genesis of mental health problems. However, evidence increasingly suggests that this neurological architecture is constantly being altered by social relations, culture and styles of living. 'This recognition', says Professor Rose, 'takes us beyond the familiar refrain that psychiatric diagnoses are social constructs, into a dynamic space in which social relations leave measurable biological and neurobiological traces in the same moment that neurobiology modulates, enables and constrains social action and interaction.' He added: 'Sociologists have spent over half a century describing the evidence that those who live in situations of poverty, exclusion and racism suffer from an excess of illness and mental disorder. However, sociologists have largely neglected to specify how these phenomena get inscribed into the body and brain.