BIOETHICS GRAND ROUNDS | CONVICTION

Race and the Trouble with Predicting Violence with Brain Technologies

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Speaker

Oliver Rollins, PhD is an Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. Rollins is a qualitative sociologist who focuses on issues of race/racism in and through science and technology. Specifically, his research explores 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, with special attention to the limits of this controversial brain model when dealing with aspects of social difference, power, and inequality. Currently, he is working on a project that examines the neuroscience of implicit bias, chiefly the challenges, consequences, and promises of operationalizing racial prejudice and identity as neurobiological processes. He is also developing a new project that seeks to elucidate and speculate, the socio-political dilemmas, ethical vulnerabilities, and anti-racist potentials for contemporary neuroscientific practices. Rollins received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco.

Objectives

•  Define the social construction of race, express how it relates to normative practices of scientific racism, and formulate new ways to dismantle practices of racial inequity that operate through biomedicine, science, and bioethics. 
•  Explain the limits of using neuroscientific technologies to predict complex social behaviors, and examine the ways that bioethics may address the potential social harms of using prediction behavior from brain data.  
•  Recognize how scientific technologies can shape our democratic understanding of criminality and safety, and how such knowledges are often uncritically built into larger scientific and biomedical practices at the expense of the health and well-being of historically marginalized populations.