Join the Discourse and Semiotics Workshop for our first talk of the semester. Dr. Oliver Rollins, Assistant Professor of Sociology, will present work from his pending book, Conviction: The Neuroscientific Quest to Unlock the Violent Brain (Stanford University Press).

 

His abstract is as follows:

 

Beyond the threat of a return of biological determinism, I argue that neuroscientists have built a new type of technology, the “violent brain.” This new sociotechnical imaginary is supposedly more plastic, race-neutral, and technologically advanced, yet in practice its inability to truly engage sociocultural power, difference, and inequality leave it fully inept to deal with violence in society.

 

Drawing on first-hand interviews and an extensive textual analysis of published research over the past thirty years, I interrogate the use and consequences of race in the resurgent neurobiology of violence. While these neuroscientists have adopted a “race-neutral” approach to their work, this move has left the research devoid of any analysis of the larger social effects of race, which ultimately nullifies their ability to address contemporary concerns about race or guard against scientific racism in the future making or use of the science. In essence, this colorblind approach further harms the population that neuroscientists set out to help in the first place, as it invites new regimes of corporeal surveillance that bolster problematic law enforcement tactics through the guise of public health and safety. Thus, this talk is not simply a critique of the glaring ways neuroscience of violence can inform racial identity, but an interrogation of its normative potentials which may, in even more insidious ways, further subjugate those populations that are most at need. Certainly, there is an urgent need to address violence in our society, but whose brain will we select and target for intervention?