Date: Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Location: 46-3002 (Singleton Auditorium)

Speaker: Oliver Rollins, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS), MIT

Hosts: Dr. Mriganka Sur, Dr. Rebecca Saxe

Talk title: What Antiracism means for (Neuro)science Today
Abstract: Historically, race—especially its erroneous interpretation as a biological reality—has played a key role in shaping scientific research about the brain. Today, neuroscience, like other related fields of biological inquiry, not only rejects its racist past but also seeks to clarify that race holds little scientific relevance in the present. In response to the Summer of 2020, for example, major scientific journals (e.g., Nature, Science, and JAMA) and institutions issued calls to better recognize and combat the underlying harms of scientific racism. However, our current sociopolitical environment raises questions about whether and how neuroscience can genuinely confront its past and contemporary interactions with race. By emphasizing how racial inequality can be perpetuated and confronted through everyday technological practices involving the brain, I aim to provide evidence of the necessity for neuroscientists and social scientists to think more collectively, critically, and creatively about the intersections between (neuro)science and the politics of social difference.