A two-day workshop interrogating whether states have a place within a transformative progressive politics will be hosted by Professor Davina Cooper on Kent’s Canterbury campus in May 2016.
Professor Davina Cooper, Professor of Law and Political Theory at Kent Law School, said: ‘If states are conceptualised in conventional ways as unified, territorially bounded, sovereign apparatuses coordinating the national and international interests of economic elites and logics, and depressing subaltern agendas, the capacity for states to advance social justice and equality may seem limited. But is it possible to conceptualise what it is to be a state differently; how much flexibility is there in the state’s reimagining?’
The workshop will include presentations and discussion based on pre-circulated short texts by an invited group of scholars. Other academics, graduate students and non-academic specialists are invited to attend and participate in the open discussion.
Key questions for participants include:
- How might the concept of the state be reimagined to support a progressive transformative politics?
- What contribution can particular disciplinary methods make to this reimagining?
- In what circumstances do legal reform campaigns and activist legal strategies draw on idealised conceptions of the state; what are the implications of doing so?
- What relationships exist between official, activist and academic ways of imagining the state (critical or otherwise) and progressive or radical politics?
- Can states be productively imagined at different scales, with different relationships to locality and globe?
- Can states develop radically new forms of political organisation and representation, and can they meaningfully support those lacking social power?
- What resources, social practices and texts – from social experiments to political texts and utopian fiction (such as News from nowhere, Woman on the edge of time etc) – might help to inspire new state imaginations?
- What can reimagining the state do (and not do)?
Professor Cooper has explored the theme of transformative politics in articles, book chapters and books over twenty years, including in: Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference (2004); Governing out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (1998); Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality and the State (1995); and Sexing the City: Lesbian and Gay Politics within the Activist State (1994). Her most recent book, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (2014) was awarded the Charles Taylor Book Award 2015.
Places on Professor Cooper’s workshop on 19/20 May are limited; to reserve a place, please email: KLSResearch@kent.ac.uk