In the face of a series of complex and seemingly intractable problems like climate change, democratic deficits, and the relationship of technology to social, political, and economic changes, this workshop raises an important question for critical social scholarship today: How can we assess and critically evaluate our present? As part of the ongoing Governing through Design workshop series, Anke Gruendel and Jan Dutkiewicz will present their works in progress on “Argumentative Information Systems and the Limits of Democratic Participation” (Anke Gruendel) and Cellular Agriculture and Techno-Pragmatism in the Anthropocene (Jan Dutkiewicz & Anne Barnhill). Our guest, Colin Koopman will serves a discussant and critical interlocutor.
Colin Koopman is the Head of Philosophy and the Director of the New Media & Culture Certificate Program at the University of Oregon. His work focuses on contributions to political theory and ethics. He has written extensively on pragmatism and genealogy with his first two books being Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (Columbia University Press 2009) and Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Indiana University Press, 2013). His most recent book, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (Chicago University Press, 2019), is taking up our information-rich present and asking about the overlay between information and politics as mediated by a form of subjectivity emergent in the twentieth century. This work is an important contribution to current debates around the politics of information and the ethics of data and indeed the question of design.