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9781478034322 Academic Inspection Copy

Conceptual Activism

Radical Sense Making and the Struggle for Gender
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The struggle over defining, naming, and using concepts is central to many political conflicts. In this original account of conceptual activism, Davina Cooper asks how new conceptual meanings are made, used, held, and experienced. Drawing on theoretical and empirical research, she analyzes the high-profile contemporary conflict in Britain over sex and gender. Here policymakers, regulatory bodies, community organizations, and academics fight to draw and redraw categories and their boundaries in a struggle that has spread across the census, speculative law reform, equality governance, and more. To understand the techniques and challenges that the advancement of new and controversial meanings faces, Conceptual Activism offers an innovative account of concepts and how meaning is reorganized in conditions of resistance, attentive to concepts' materiality, plasticity, force, and unexpected encounters. As sex and gender meet economy, property, play, and activism, Cooper demonstrates how and why academic work should engage in conceptual activism.
Davina Cooper is Research Professor in Law and Political Theory at King's College London and author of Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority and Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces, both published by Duke University Press.
"Brilliant--analytically, rhetorically, imagistically. It is hard to describe how something written with such sobriety and clarity can be so exciting. But it is. Every plank of conventional and gender studies wisdom is quietly considered, then contested, every relevant literature (philosophy, methods, law, etc.) peeled away to enable new moves."--Bonnie Honig, author of, Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump "In Conceptual Activism, Davina Cooper brings her distinctive and imaginative scholarly voice to political contestations about the concepts that shape our worlds. Brilliantly combining empirical research with theoretical insight into conceptual terrains that can be at once highly mobile and politically resilient, Cooper provides an exceptionally rich analysis of some of the most contentious concepts of the present."--Margaret Davies, author of, EcoLaw: Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature
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