What Kind of Concept Is Decertification? Concepts as Worlds, Currents, and Cells

Decertification describes the abolition of legal sex status, but what kind of a concept is it? This seminar will use decertification as an example to explore how concepts can assume the shape of worlds, currents, and cells as well as their more familiar shape as tools. If concepts can assume different shapes with different properties, what does this mean for feminist and other progressive and radical academic projects?

This session of the Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group will explore how concepts can function as forms of activism, drawing on Davina Cooper’s recent article, How concepts do activism: as worlds, aids, cells, and currents. The article forms the basis of a forthcoming book on Conceptual Activism (Duke University Press, forthcoming autumn) and offers a distinctive way of thinking about what concepts are and what they do, based on interviews with academics across a range of disciplines.

The author will introduce the article, outline its aims, and then open the discussion to participants. Participants are suggested to read the article in advance of the session. Further references on decertification will be shared separately for those who wish to explore the topic in more depth.

Recommended Pre-Reading:

Cooper, D. (2025). How concepts do activism: as worlds, aids, cells, and currents. Cultural Studies, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2025.2467716 

Further Reading:  

Cooper, D. (2022). Researching a Prefigurative Law Reform Proposal. Legalities. https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/legal.2022.0036?journalCode=legal 

Davina Cooper is a Research Professor in Law and Political Theory. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose work focuses on concepts, transformative politics, state activism, and experimental communities. She is an elected Fellow of the British Academy and elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Between 2018-22, she directed the ESRC funded research project on the Future of Legal Gender - which explored the implications and stakes of abolishing legal sex and gender status. In October 2022, Davina started work on a two-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship entitled: "Gender and the Conceptual Imagination", which aims to advance understanding of conceptual prefiguration, as a methodological, empirical and theoretical approach, in relation to gender. 

She is widely published, including her books Feeling like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority (Duke, 2019); Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Duke 2014); Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference (CUP, 2004); Governing out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (Rivers Oram, 1998); Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality, and the State (OU/ NYU, 1995); and Sexing the City: Lesbian and Gay Politics within the Activist State (Rivers Oram, 1994).

See more here.

Mihika is a DPhil candidate in law at the University of Oxford. She is undertaking research on legal recognition of personal characteristics, including race, sex/gender and caste. See here.