Oliver Rollins is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society. He examines the sociological dimensions of neuroscience. Specifically, Rollins uses qualitative research methods (interviews, participant observation, and textual content analysis) to explore how systemic practices of social difference and inequality influence, engage with, and are affected by, the making and use of neuroscientific knowledges and technologies.
Professor Rollins’s book, Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of The Violent Brain (Stanford University Press, 2021), traces the evolution of neuroimaging research on anti-social behavior, stressing the limits of this controversial brain model when dealing with aspects of social inequality. Conviction shows how researchers leverage brain science to advance predictive models of criminality. While neuroscientists defend their research as more ethically and technologically sound than the oft-critique biocriminology of yesteryear, Rollins challenges the claims that the “violent brain” model yields neutral, more sound, or socially useful risk predictions. The book’s central critique is that efforts to quantify the complexities and contradictions of the social world via brain circuits fail to consider how unequal life experiences intricately empower and facilitate how society recognizes and responds to so-called violent behaviors and persons. Ultimately, such neuro-predictions of criminal risk help re-envision, and ultimately silence, the voices, bodies, and experiences of those most affected by social inequality. Conviction, therefore, makes clear that the threat from biological theories of violence today is less about the return of an older bio-deterministic rationale of crime and instead rests in the way (neuro)biologic risk calculations normatively preserve static social inequities through the technical omission of unequal life chances.
Professor Rollins’s two new projects focus more squarely on the relationships between race and neuroscience. His second book project grapples with the legacies of scientific racism in and through the mind and brain sciences; Rollins asks: how has neuroscience shaped our understanding and experiences with race, and in what ways has race influenced the making and potential of neuroscience? Starting with contemporary studies of neuroscience and implicit racial bias, this book seeks to challenge STS to rethink the dynamism of scientific racism in light of neuro advances and refocus attention on the ways race/racism remain viable today through the reliance on “optimally functioning” neuroscientific practices and technologies without the need for racist intent. Rollins recently received an NSF CAREER Award to investigate the intersections between social justice and science. This study, his third project, hinges on one overarching query: What are the contemporary relationships, possibilities, and limitations between neuroscience and social justice? Rollins will (1) interrogate DEI programs and agendas in the neurosciences, (2) map the relationships between neuroscientific social worlds, those overlapping domains that mutually shape the politics and possibilities of neuroscientific knowledge, (3) examine the perspectives of racially marginalized neuroscience scholars and their views on the future of neuroscience and its social justice vulnerabilities and potentialities and (4) develop meso-level policy recommendation and educational resources that address social and ethical impacts of neuroscience.
Professor Rollins received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Before joining MIT, he held faculty positions at the University of Washington and the University of Louisville and was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Race, Science, & Society. Rollins’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and he has extensive experience as a collaborating researcher, including projects funded by The Dana Foundation, NSF, and The Wellcome Trust.