How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This session brings together experts in political and media theory to discuss Colin Koopman’s groundbreaking new book on data-tracking technologies, their role in shaping how we understand ourselves as persons, and the challenges they pose for democratic politics. The book and the roundtable session dedicated to it will thus speak directly to the 2020 theme, “Democracy, Difference, and Destabilization.”

How We Became Our Data excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. It explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points has a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think, and this past shapes how we understand ourselves as subjects of information. How We Became Our Data presents an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood and how we can resist its erosion.

The participants of this roundtable will examine the key contributions of Koopman’s book and grapple with the implications of his novel account of the politics of information for deliberative democratic theory and practice.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson Syracuse University

Presenters

• Davide Panagia UCLA

• Jennifer Forestal Loyola University, Chicago

• Ashley Elizabeth Gorham Hamilton College

• Colin Koopman University of Oregon