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166When data drive health: an archaeology of medical records technologyBiosocieties 17 (4): 782-804. 2022.Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational requirements that originate well outside of…Read more
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218Information before information theory: The politics of data beyond the perspective of communicationNew Media and Society. forthcoming.Scholarship on the politics of new media widely assumes that communication functions as a sufficient conceptual paradigm for critically assessing new media politics. This article argues that communication-centric analyses fail to engage the politics of information itself, limiting information only to its consequences for communication, and neglecting information as it reaches into our selves, lives, and actions beyond the confines of communication. Furthering recent new media historiography on t…Read more
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3The Uses of Philosophy after the Collapse of MetaphysicsIn Alan R. Malachowski (ed.), A companion to Rorty, Wiley. 2020.Richard Rorty's pragmatism is a distinctively doubled philosophy formed at the twain of a rigorous antifoun‐dational philosophical perspective and a committed postmetaphysical cultural criticism. Rorty instead rigorously held to the line that no particular politics follows from anti‐foundational philosophy. Rorty's arguments against representationalism, foundationalism, and metaphysics‐first philosophy in Mirror are complex and not always easy to navigate without careful guidance. The risk of th…Read more
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11The Formation and Self‐Transformation of the Subject in Foucault's EthicsIn Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary & Jana Sawicki (eds.), A Companion to Foucault, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.This chapter begins by briefly considering Foucault's genealogies of the modern moral subject as the backdrop against which he conducted his inquiries on the ethical forms of subjectivation found in antiquity. It then turns at greater length to these inquiries, bringing them into focus in terms of possibilities for the self‐transformation of the subject today. To make sense of these possibilities, and defend them against familiar criticisms, the chapter introduces and defends a meta‐ethical dist…Read more
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75. Critical Problematization in Foucault and Deleuze: The Force of Critique without JudgmentIn Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail & Daniel Warren Smith (eds.), Between Deleuze and Foucault, Edinburgh University. pp. 87-119. 2016.
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44. Must Philosophy Be Obligatory?In Samir Haddad, Penelope Deutscher & Olivia Custer (eds.), Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics, Columbia University Press. pp. 63-79. 2016.
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182From Galton’s Pride to Du Bois’s Pursuit: The Formats of Data-Driven InequalityTheory, Culture and Society 41 (1): 59-78. 2024.Data increasingly drive our lives. Often presented as a new trajectory, the deep immersion of our lives in data has a history that is well over a century old. By revisiting the work of early pioneers of what would today be called data science, we can bring into view both assumptions that fund our data-driven moment as well as alternative relations to data. I here excavate insights by contrasting a seemingly unlikely pair of early data technologists, Francis Galton and W.E.B. Du Bois. Galton, wel…Read more
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21Experience, Language, and Behavior in Pragmatism: A Response to Voparil’s Reconstructing PragmatismContemporary Pragmatism 19 (4): 417-429. 2022.Chris Voparil’s Reconstructing Pragmatism builds the best case to date that the neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty decisively and productively reshaped the lineage of pragmatist philosophy. In developing new directions for pragmatism, the book seeks to press past a number of recent debates. One such debate concerns the relative priority of experience and language as methodological starting points for pragmatist philosophy. While Voparil seeks to abandon this debate as outworn, this review a…Read more
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18The Relationship between Moral Philosophy and Political Philosophy in William JamesContemporary Pragmatism 19 (1): 1-10. 2022.This review essay is occasioned by two books on the moral and political thought of William James. Sarin Marchetti’s Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James and Trygve Throntveit’s William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic pose crucial questions for how we are to frame, interpret, and assess the philosophical contributions of William James more than one hundred years after his passing. In offering interpretations of James as contributing to social and political questions thro…Read more
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184The Political Theory of Data: Institutions, Algorithms, & Formats in Racial RedliningPolitical Theory 50 (2): 337-361. 2022.Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst, we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward a political theory of data. This article maps some…Read more
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9Preface to Symposium on Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson's "Genealogies of Terrorism"Foucault Studies 1 (28): 1-3. 2020.
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186Coding the Self: The Infopolitics and Biopolitics of Genetic SciencesHastings Center Report 50 (S1): 6-14. 2020.This article compares three models for conceptualizing the political and ethical challenges of contemporary genetics, genomics, and postgenomics. The three analytical approaches are referred to as the state-politics model, the biopolitical model, and the infopolitical model. Each of these models is valuable for different purposes. But comparing these models in terms of their influence in contemporary discussions, the first is by far the dominant approach, the second is gaining in importance, and…Read more
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28Transition, Action and Education: Redirecting Pragmatist Philosophy of EducationJournal of Philosophy of Education 53 (4): 734-747. 2019.Recent developments in contemporary pragmatist thought have the potential to help reshape our understandings of pragmatism in philosophy of education. We first survey the development of pragmatism as founded in experience, moving through linguistic pragmatism, to a newer actionistic approach in conduct pragmatism. Conduct pragmatism prioritises action over both experience and discursive thought in ways that can be central to educational activity and projects. Conduct pragmatism so conceived has …Read more
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13Preface to Symposium on David Rondel’s Pragmatist EgalitarianismContemporary Pragmatism 16 (4): 307-310. 2019.David Rondel’s Pragmatism Egalitarianism offers valuable contributions to both contemporary pragmatist scholarship and contemporary political philosophy. The book was the focus of a discussion at the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division meeting in April of 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia. That discussion forms the basis for the four essays gathered here: three critical responses from Susan Dieleman, Alexander Livingston, and Robert Talisse, as well as David Rondel’s reply to…Read more
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143How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational PersonUniversity of Chicago Press. 2019.We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerati…Read more
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82Problematization in foucault’s genealogy and deleuze’s symptomatology: Or, how to study sexuality without invoking oppositionsAngelaki 23 (2): 187-204. 2018.The work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze frequently gave rise to a practice of philosophy as a form of critical problematization. Critical problematization both resonates between their thought and is also generative for contemporary philosophy in their wake. To examine critical problematization in each, a shared theme of inquiry provides a useful focal point. Foucault and Deleuze each deployed critical problematization in the context of studies of sexuality, a site of excited contestation …Read more
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13Introductory Notes on the Obama and Pragmatism SymposiumContemporary Pragmatism 8 (2): 1-5. 2011.
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9Standard forms of power: Biopower and sovereign power in the technology of the US birth certificate, 1903–1935Constellations 25 (4): 641-656. 2018.
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39Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and RortyColumbia University Press. 2009.Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn,…Read more
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65Critique without judgment in political theory: Politicization in Foucault’s historical genealogy of Herculine BarbinContemporary Political Theory 18 (4): 477-497. 2019.The historical specificity of Michel Foucault’s practice of critical genealogy offers a valuable model for political theory today. By bringing into focus its historical attention to detail, we can locate in Foucault’s genealogical philosophy an alternative to prominent assumptions in contemporary political theory. The work of political theory is often positioned in light of an assumed goal of staking political theory to certain political positions, judgments, or normative determinations that alr…Read more
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1799Infopolitics, Biopolitics, AnatomopoliticsGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 39 (1): 103-128. 2018.This paper argues for a distinctive concept of "infopolitics" as a theoretical tool for understanding how new regimes of data are exerting increasing political control of our lives. It seems almost undeniable today that there is a politics at stake in such ubiquitous features of our society as social media interaction, electioneering (and election hacking) through those interactions, cell phone addiction, personal information monetization, the lack of security in personal data markets, and massi…Read more
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22Transforming the Self amidst the Challenges of Chance: William James on "Our Undisciplinables"Diacritics 44 (4): 40-65. 2016.William James’s moral and political thought was remarkably well adapted to its historical context, in particular to the emergence in the late nineteenth century of a generalized culture of uncertainty, contingency, and probability that called into question traditional conceptions of sovereign selfhood and autonomous freedom. Facing the solidification of numerous apparatus of chance, James developed a strenuous ethics rooted in a conception of freedom as self-transformation. That this ethics wa…Read more
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76Conceptual Analysis for Genealogical Philosophy: How to Study the History of Practices after Foucault and WittgensteinSouthern Journal of Philosophy 55 (S1): 103-121. 2017.Inquiry into the history of practices in the manner of Foucault's philosophical genealogy requires that we distinguish between practical action, on the one hand, and mere behavior, on the other. The need for this distinction may help explicate an aspect of Foucault's philosophical genealogy that might otherwise appear misplaced, namely his attention to rationalities and its attendant conceptual material. This article shows how a genealogical attention to practice goes hand in hand with an attent…Read more
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8Ethics and Philosophical Critique in Williams James (review)Philosophical Quarterly 67 (267): 416-418. 2017.
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26Privacy is an Essentially Contested Concept: A Multidimensional Analytic for Mapping PrivacyPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 374 (2083). 2016.
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23Unruly Pluralism and Inclusive Tolerance: The Normative Contribution of Jamesian Pragmatism to Non-Ideal TheoryPolitical Studies Review 14 (1): 27-38. 2016.Much attention is focussed on recent debates in contemporary political philosophy concerning the relative merits of ideal theory and non-ideal theory. In one of their many forms, these debates take shape as a realist challenge to idealistic or utopian approaches to normative political theory. This article shows that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism both instructively anticipates and also, more importantly, can today contribute to contemporary realism. It is shown how a political pragmat…Read more
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42The Will, the Will to Believe, and William James: An Ethics of Freedom as Self-TransformationJournal of the History of Philosophy 55 (3): 491-512. 2017.William James's writings on morality form a vexed collection. Most philosophers regard James as having contributed primarily to epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology, viewing his moral philosophy as secondary, derivative, and accordingly uninteresting for contemporary debates. Among James's writings on moral matters, surely the most infamous is "The Will to Believe." Often read as primarily a contribution to epistemology or philosophy of religion,1 a number of critics spanning well over one …Read more
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