
Oliver Rollins is an assistant professor at MIT. His work interrogates how racial identity, racialized discourses, and systemic practices of social difference influence, engage with, and are affected by, the making and use of neuroscientific technologies and knowledges. Rollins’s book, Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of The Violent Brain (Stanford University Press, 2021), traces the development and use of neuroimaging research on anti-social behaviors and crime, with special attention to the limits of this controversial brain model when dealing with aspects of social difference, power, and inequality. Rollins’s current work focuses on the social, ethical, and political impacts on the neuroscience of implicit racial bias, which scrutinizes the way racial prejudice and identity are valued and measured as neurobiological processes, and outlines the socio-political dilemmas, ethical vulnerabilities, anti-racist potentials for contemporary neuroscientific practices. Rollins received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco.