Sky Gross is a Horowitz postdoctoral fellow at the department of sociology and anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. Sky’s research foci and background include several lanes, among which are subjects of prenatal testing in the ultraorthodox Jewish community, social microdynamics in postnatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, inclusion of complementary medicine in the delivery room, and epistemological and symbolic boundaries between biomedical and complementary practitioners in the hospital setting.
In her more recent work she considers issues associated with both philosophical and anthropological understandings of the brain and its relation to conceptualizations of the ‘mind’. With this intention, she uses historical analysis to approach the ethical debate surrounding the practice of frontal lobotomy. In her latest published paper, she brings an extensive fieldwork in a neurooncology clinic to shed light on complex expert and lay constructions of brain tumors as objects for diagnosis.
She is now working on two main projects namely, the cultural correlates of neuroanatomical research and brain localization (or ‘how is culture mapped onto the brain’); and, based on participant observation in brain surgeries, the place of the ‘mind’ in the operating room.
She is co-editor, along with dr. Uri Maoz from the California Institute of Technology, of a book concluding a series of interdisciplinary workshops in which neuroscientists, neurologists, law experts, philosophers, and social scientists sought to contribute to the understanding of several key issues in neuroethics, including questions of ‘free will’, criminal responsibility, and the changing role of psychiatry in view of recent neuroscientific advances.
Sky is currently developing venues for collaboration with outstanding scholars in the field of neuroethics and social studies of neuroscience, in view of advancing research in an area that requires further institutional support as well as international cooperation.
Among her publications:
Gross, Sky E. (2010): “‘The Alien Baby’: Risk, Blame and Prenatal Indeterminacy”. Health Risk and Society, forthcoming.
Gross, Sky E. (2009): “Experts and ‘knowledge that counts’: A study into the world of brain cancer diagnosis”. Social Science and Medicine 69(12), 1819-1826
Shuval, Judith T. and Gross, Sky E. (2008): “Feminism in the Delivery Room: Midwives Practicing Alternative Healthcare”. Journal of Complementary Health Research, 13(1), 46-62.
Gross, Sky E.and Shuval, Judith T. (2008): “On Knowing and Believing: Prenatal Genetic Testing and Resistance to Risk Medicine”. Health Risk and Society 10(6), 1-16.
Gross, Sky E. and Benavot, Aaron (2007): “Realising EU-topia: Insiders’ Views on an Emerging EU Research Community”. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 20(3), 279-294.
Shuval, Judith T. and Gross, Sky E. (2006): “Nurses and Midwives in Alternative Healthcare: Comparative Processes of Boundary Re-configuration”. In: Tovey, P. and Adams, J. (eds.): Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Nursing and Midwifery: Towards a Critical Social Science. Routledge Publishers.
Benavot, Aaron, Erbes-Seguin, Sabine and Gross, Sky E. (2005): “Interdisciplinarity in EU-Funded Social Science Projects.” In M. Kuhn and S. Otto Remøe (eds.) Building the European Research Area – Socio-economic Research in Practise”. New York: Peter Lang Publishers.
Mizrachi, Nissim, Shuval, Judith T. and Gross, Sky E. (2005): “Boundary at Work: Alternative Medicine in Biomedical Settings”, Sociology of Health and Illness. 27(1), 20-43.