Professor Oliver Rollins’s talk extends the arguments from his book Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain to examine how contemporary neuroscientists have reframed the brain as a predictive technology—an imagined site of forensic insight, clinical intervention, and, increasingly, judicial certainty. He argues that the so‑called “violent brain” is not an objective scientific or legal entity but a 21st‑century form of carceral mind‑reading that emerges from contested legal, (bio)political, and racial histories. Drawing on recent legal and policy decisions that rely on neuroscientific expertise, He shows how neuropredictive and mind‑reading–oriented tools deployed in criminal‑legal contexts revive older biological efforts to associate Blackness and racialized difference with heightened “future dangerousness.” By tracing the epistemic and political work these technologies perform, the talk demonstrates how contemporary regimes of prediction extend long‑standing practices of surveillance, assessment, and control—now reauthorized through the powerful veneer of scientific neutrality.

About Oliver Rollins

Oliver Rollins is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This event is free and open to the public.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Sociology and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty and it is free and open to the public.