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3 books match the query 'Cooper, Davina'

cover of Conceptual Activism: Radical Sense-Making and the Struggle for Gender

Conceptual Activism

Radical Sense-Making and the Struggle for Gender

Davina Cooper

Duke University Press, 2026

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.
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cover of Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

Everyday Utopias

The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

Davina Cooper

Duke University Press, 2013

Everyday utopias enact conventional activities in unusual ways. Instead of dreaming about a better world, participants seek to create it. As such, their activities provide vibrant and stimulating contexts for considering the terms of social life, of how we live together and are governed. Weaving conceptual theorizing together with social analysis, Davina Cooper examines utopian projects as seemingly diverse as a feminist bathhouse, state equality initiatives, community trading networks, and a democratic school where students and staff collaborate in governing. She draws from firsthand observations and interviews with participants to argue that utopian projects have the potential to revitalize progressive politics through the ways their innovative practices incite us to rethink mainstream concepts including property, markets, care, touch, and equality. This is no straightforward story of success, however, but instead a tale of the challenges concepts face as they move between being imagined, actualized, hoped for, and struggled over. As dreaming drives new practices and practices drive new dreams, everyday utopias reveal how hard work, feeling, ethical dilemmas, and sometimes, failure, bring concepts to life.
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cover of Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority

Feeling Like a State

Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority

Davina Cooper

Duke University Press, 2019

A transformative progressive politics requires the state's reimagining. But how should the state be reimagined, and what can invigorate this process? In Feeling Like a State, Davina Cooper explores the unexpected contribution a legal drama of withdrawal might make to conceptualizing a more socially just, participative state. In recent years, as gay rights have expanded, some conservative Christians—from charities to guesthouse owners and county clerks—have denied people inclusion, goods, and services because of their sexuality. In turn, liberal public bodies have withdrawn contracts, subsidies, and career progression from withholding conservative Christians. Cooper takes up the discourses and practices expressed in this legal conflict to animate and support an account of the state as heterogeneous, plural, and erotic. Arguing for the urgent need to put new imaginative forms into practice, Cooper examines how dissident and experimental institutional thinking materialize as people assert a democratic readiness to recraft the state.
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