How a referendum might actually support democracy

A fight has been raging since Brexit over whether the people’s will has expressed itself; and if it has, what did it say? Davina Cooper explores how a referendum might actually help to support a democrac

Retrieving the State for Radical Politics - A Conceptual and Playful Challenge

Whether states can ever contribute to progressive social transformation has long divided the left. But is this division dependent on a particular state conception? If the state can be meaningfully conceptualised in multiple ways, are there ways of conceptualising that might bridge this political divide, granting the state a constructive part within radical left politics? This essay adopts a utopian conceptual methodology to consider more politically hopeful ways for reimagining what it means to be a state. It challenges an anti-state left perspective on four grounds: to avoid the reification of a bounded state; to avoid romanticising civil society as the state’s antithesis; to pay attention to dissident intra-state actions; and to recognise the importance of different governing scales. But if the state concept should be retrieved, what can statehood mean? Does local government offer a more progressive paradigm than the nation-state with its radically different relationship to space and governing? And what then follows? What does imagining progressive states do since they cannot be practiced in any simple sense? If reimagining the state is not to be hopeless, are modes of take-up available that can prefigure the state without relying on its material actualisation? This essay explores the possibilities 'play' offers for representing what states and institutional systems could be like. Taking pop-up republics, crowd-sourced constitutions, fictive feminist legal judgments, and local currencies as contemporary examples, it considers play as a register for experimenting with other modes of political government. The essay closes by addressing two questions: if counter-representational forms of play involve performing institutional activities differently, are there good reasons to articulate these together into reimagined states, using play to experiment with new forms of assemblage? Second, what can playing at other kinds of states or institutions accomplish politically

Prefiguring the State

Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished‐for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my discussion is the plural state—taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a “thinking tool”, an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges

Conversing with ghosts: prefigurative talk and the shifting contours of intellectual debate.

Next in our #AcWri2016 series is a reflection on conversational writing and academic thought. Academic discussion typically appears as clustered conversations. Davina Cooper focuses on the dilemma posed by prefigurative contributions, where academics respond to a discussion as if it is taking place, treating it as if it were the one that ought to be taking place, even though speakers know the actual conversation is otherwise. What do prefigurative contributions actually contribute

Transformative State Publics

Against the conventional assumption that publics, and particularly radical publics, are outside the state, this article explores their mutual combination and entanglement in order to consider how states might contribute to progressive politics. At the heart of this account is a concept of the state that incorporates the dissident and fleeting, and a conception of transformative publics based on four modalities: prefigurative, improper, liberatory and unconditional. Transformative publics can be found within state formations; they also combine with them to produce new political governance relations. To develop this argument, the article focuses on two kinds of publics: those involving compelled state actors, such as school children and prisoners; and those, such as protest camps, taking shape through grass-roots political action

The materiality of research: what do we write to convey? By Davina Cooper

In this feature essay, Davina Cooper grapples with the charge that academic writing is incomprehensible to those outside its field of reference. She explores the possibility of approaching academic writing as a conversation that aims to make contact – a more active relationship than simply becoming more accessible – and stimulate others to participate in the dialogue. This post was originally published on Davina Cooper’s blog and is being republished as part of the LSE RB series examining the material cultures of academic research, reading and writing. If you would like to contribute, please contact the Managing Editor of LSE Review of Books, Dr Rosemary Deller, at [email protected]

Materiality of research: can imaginative projects complement (and not displace) more critical research?

Can projects of reimagining complement more critical research? Writing in response to comments on her recent work on reimagining the state, Davina Cooper addresses the challenge of developing transformative methods, the value of institutional play in academic research and the relationship these may have to more overtly ‘critical’ accounts

Taking Public Responsibility for Gender: When Personal Identity and Institutional Feminist Politics Meet

This essay explores the challenge that soft decertification poses for feminist politics. In soft decertification, people continue to have a formal legal sex/ gender status; however, public and other bodies act as if such status was no longer determinative (at least in certain contexts). As glimpses of soft decertification emerge, what are its implications for gender equality initiatives hitherto focused on addressing the asymmetrically patterned lives of women and men? What new ways of understanding gender are coming to the fore, and what challenges arise for bodies engaged in equality governance in trying to address them? This essay explores these questions through the prism of responsibility - the ethical, political, and legal obligation to pay attention or respond that different bodies have because of their capacity to undo or ameliorate social inequalities and other injustices. Specifically, it asks: What does responsibility for gender entail when gender is treated as both institutionalised and self-determined; public and private? The essay addresses two contexts where equality governance approaches gender as a site of institutional re-making and redress. The first concerns the front-stage initiatives and policies of public sector provision; the second concerns the back-stage scenes of organisational action, where informal decision-making arises. In both cases, taking responsibility for gender, as an institution, is far from straight-forward. This essay explores the importance of doing so - not just despite, but because of, the complex conditions responsibility confronts when institutional forms also exist as individual attachments

Theorising Nudist Equality: An Encounter between Political Fantasy and Public Appearance

This paper approaches in/equality theorising through the lens of social nudism. Its starting point is a left conception of inequality where systemic power and the politics of oppression displace liberal concerns with immutability, offence, and the removal of impediments. But if undoing inequality involves more than clearing away obstacles, what else is at stake? Refracted through nudist subordination, response takes two forms. The first addresses the criteria through which discrimination gets converted into illegitimate inequality. The second considers the manifold character of equality's ambition. Reading equality as an open-ended fantasy, with material effects, that guides and is shaped by moments of political unsettling, the paper focuses on nudism's eruption in non-nude publics. Through these non-normative moments of public appearance, the paper addresses the relationship between equality, contact, and “lines of undoing” subordination, and asks whether the nudist/textile divide highlights the limits to group-based understandings of inequality