Dr. Koopman is on a NEH-funded research sabbatical for the entirety of calendar year 2024 (and may respond to emails with delay during this period).

Colin Koopman's writing and teaching are focused on contributions to political theory and ethics.  His current focus is on the the politics of information and the ethics of data.  He explores these fields in terms of century-old predecessor technologies that continue to condition contemporary techno-trends that are often presented as importantly new. Methodologically, this work mobilizes analytics and concepts from the philosophical traditions of genealogy and pragmatism to engage current issues of politics, ethics, and culture.  From a metaphilosophical perspective, his work is expressive of a pluralistic practice of philosophy that draws widely on diverse figures, traditions, disciplines, and themes.  He has written on a range of figures across genealogy (Foucault, Nietzsche, Williams) and pragmatism (James, Du Bois, Dewey, Rorty, Brandom) as well as other thinkers in Continental (Deleuze, Habermas, Latour) and Analytic (Wittgenstein, Cavell, Rawls) philosophy.  His work also engages research in other disciplinary contexts by media scholars, historians anthropologists, political scientists, legal theorists, and information scientists.

Dr. Koopman's current recent research is focused on the politics of data technologies.  This work is represented in the following publications and profiles:

• How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. This project focuses on the overlay between information and politics as mediated by a form of subjectivity emergent in the twentieth century.  Research for this work included studies of the early years of scientific personality psychology (ca. 1917-1937), the racialization of real estate appraisal practices in America (ca. 1923-1934), and the history of identification paperwork (ca. 1913-1933).  Summaries of parts of the book are available elsewhere in:
  • A profile of Koopman in The New York Times by David Marchese (2023).
  • An early preivew piece on 'Infopolitics' from the New York Times (2014) and a more recent New York Times piece on Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal (2018)
  • Or, see his talk on "Infopolitics" at his undergrad alma mater (The Evergreen State College, a small public lib arts college in WA state)
• The Our Data, Our Selves web project brings together some of his individual and collaborative research on the genealogies of data systems and their ongoing functions in our historical present.

Ongoing work includes research (individual or collaborative) toward contributions on:

• Relational Egalitarianism in Data Systems
• A Methodology for Evaluating Datasets: Format Anatomies
• A Genealogy of Intelligence Testing in relation to Artificial Intelligence
• A Genealogy of Information in the History of Genetics
• A Genealogy of Medical Records (comparing clinical and insurance records)
• Genealogical Realism in Political Theory
• Selected studies in the History of Philosophy, with current interest in: Simondon and Arendt

Books:

• How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person, University of Chicago Press, 2019 (see a review symposium at Syndicate: Philosophy)
• Genealogy as Critique, Indiana University Press, 2013 (see a review symposium in Foucault Studies, no. 18)
• Pragmatism as Transition, Columbia University Press, 2009 (see a review symposium in Contemporary Pragmatism in 2017 published upon the paperback release)

Articles and Essays:

• On Data Politics:
  • Current research in this area, some of which will appear in an in-progress book project tentatively titled Data Equals, includes an article on the histories of data-driven inequality in the milieu of W.E.B. Du Bois and Francis Galton (published in Theory, Culture, & Society) and an article arguing for a political theory of formats, aka data structures (published in Political Theory).
  • A distillation of the contributions to media theory and media historiography offered in How We Became Our Data appears in "Information before information theory: The politics of data beyond the perspective of communication" in New Media and Society
  • A distillation of the contributions to political philosophy offered in How We Became Our Data appears in "Infopolitics, Biopolitics, Anatamopolitics" at the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal.
  • Some arguments from the book are also summarized in two short pieces in The New York Times: "The Age of 'Infopolitics'" and "How Democracy Can Survive Big Data."
• On Genealogy and Pragmatism:
  • A summary of a few key ideas from Koopman's first two books is available in a précis article titled "Genealogical Pragmatism."
  • Representative scholarship on figures in the history of philosophy include are a pair of companion papers on Foucault's genealogy in Critical Inquiry (in the Summer 2013 issue) and in Constellations (in the December 2015 issue), and another pair of companion papers on James's pragmatism in Journal of the History of  Philosophy (in the July 2017 issue) and in diacritics (in a 2016 issue).
  • Other publications on genealogy and pragmatism have appeared in journals including: Critical Inquiry, diacritics, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, The Review of Metaphysics, Constellations, Philosophy & Social Criticism, The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Contemporary Pragmatism, Foucault Studies, and elsewhere.
  • Editorial projects on these topics have included a special issue on interdisciplinary uses of Foucault (in History of the Human Sciences), another issue on Foucault and Pragmatism (published in Foucault Studies), and a co-edited volume on Rorty and cultural critical philosophy (published by Bloomsbury [formerly Continuum]).

Website:

• For further details, please visit Colin Koopman's regularly updated website where you will find a complete list of publications: https://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/.

Please email Dr. Koopman directly for syllabi and course descriptions.  Selected sample syllabi are presented below:

• Syllabus for PHIL 420 - American Philosophy [2018]
• Syllabus for PHIL 102 - Ethics [2019]
• Syllabus for PHIL 615 - Genealogy & Realism in Political Theory [2019]
• Syllabus for PHIL 307 - Political Philosophy [2019]