Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn - Understanding curiosity, nourishing a life, and how thoughts move
Twins Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn are curious. Their work, individually and together, gives new conception and language to what curiosity is, the work that it does in the world. These are human beings of intelligence and integrity and deep care, and their reification of curiosity might just be a generative narrative of our time.
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Perry Zurn (pronouns he/him) is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies, the Honors Program, and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. His research moves across political philosophy, critical theory, transgender studies, psychology, and network neuroscience. Zurn is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry; and co-editor of two volumes Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition & Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge.
Dani Bassett (pronouns they/them) is J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. They are also an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Their work blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks have been among the most highly cited in science and are unanimously recognized as frontier, including as the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant in 2014.
They are unexampled transdisciplinarians, and in each field they visit a trail of new research, articulation, and generosity follows. Literal hundreds of research articles, books, interviews, awards too many to utter, and likely innumerable other invisible impacts punctuate their paths through this world.
Together they are the thinkers and creators behind the new book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, a master work in unraveling, deconstructing, dancing along, rewriting the neurological, historical, philosophical, and linguistic foundations of curiosity. It is as intellectually exhilarating as it is artistically beautiful.
Their book, as their lives, is inspiration toward inquiry, an inquiry that lies at the heart of a flourishing life, and because as they write 'knowledge is a network,' for a flourishing world.
So this is a conversation about curiosity. But it is also about where curiosity comes from, where it goes, what it changes. Both engage and animate their curiosity toward good that it can do in our world. Dani's neuroscience might hold secrets for how we address mental health. Perry's philosophy could help us transcend established frames of knowledge.