David Earle Hopping

David Earle Hopping, 71, passed away on April 10, 2024, in Champaign, Illinois. He was born in Los Angeles, California, to Ralph and Shirley Hopping. After returning from military service in Korea during the Vietnam War, he attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, living at Cowell College, where his intellectual vision was shaped by the teachings of Mishael M. Caspi, Norman O. Brown, and Gregory Bateson. Through his twenties, he engaged in professional and volunteer work that involved securing the safety and well-being of others. He also gained a wide range of practical skills, working in construction while pivoting towards software development. David was so brilliant, capable, and kind that it seemed to those who knew him that there was no concept he could not understand, no living creature he could not calm, nothing broken he could not fix.

He married Judith Pintar in 1989. They spent the first five years of their marriage living in the cabin his grandfather built in the redwoods above Santa Cruz, before moving to Champaign to pursue graduate study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. David received his Ph.D. in Sociology in 2001. His dissertation, 'Beyond the Caring State: Civic Ideals and the Architecture of Human Development,' was based on his work at Hope Meadows, an intergenerational community in Rantoul, Illinois. He became a Visiting Research Associate in the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, studying issues relating to foster care, adoption, aging, and intergenerational social service programming. He subsequently worked with Hope Meadows founder, Brenda Eheart, to create Generations of Hope, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of intergenerational communities as a response to a range of intractable social problems.

In 2019 David accepted a faculty position in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois. He is the co-author of Information Science: the Basics (Routledge, 2023). Most recently he has been co-developing, with his students, the Web Innovation Studio, a pedagogical approach to teaching web development that engages students in meaningful, collaborative work.

More than everything else David was a loving husband and father to his wife Judith and his children David and Iona Sofia. He is survived by brothers Ron (Rose), Mike (Eileen), and Robert (Cindy), sister Nancy (Jesse), step-father Jack, stepsister Kristen, Uncle Dan (Sunny), father-in-law George, sister-in-law Janice (Dan), brothers-in-law Jim (Susan) and Paul, many nieces and nephews: Jen, Nicole, Ron, Michael, and Alyse; Anna and Mieke; Rachelle, Nick, and Michael; Jason, Mariah, and Brandon; Dwyer and Willa; grand nieces and nephews, many cousins, in-laws, and friends across the United States and in Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia. He also leaves a treasured circle of life-long companions: Eliot, Jim, Walker, Mark, and Jeff.

A virtual memorial may be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers or other gestures, the family asks that you consider a donation to Hope Meadows, https://hopemeadows.org/. Any donations made during this period will go towards the continuation of Davids web development project, curating the 30-year history of Hope Meadows and Generations of Hope.

Davids work urged us beyond sympathy or despair for the most vulnerable among us, towards an understanding of the essential relationality of social life, an imaginary of encircling care, and the necessity of world-changing action to bring it about.

For to him that is joined to all the living, there is hope. Ecclesiastes 9:4

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing eye can see, does not imagine at all. William Blake