Diana Coole
Biographic Data
| ID | 291955 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diana Coole |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diana |
| FAMILY NAME | Coole |
| SIGNATURE | COOLE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birkbeck, University of London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 250 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Toxification of Population Discourse. A Genealogical Study
During the 1960s and 70s, reducing human numbers was embraced as integral to radical social transformation. Subsequently such neoMalthusian prescriptions became so toxic, they disappeared from the political agenda. Only recently has the issue resurfaced. This article suggests it is worthwhile revisiting the population question but recognises that the reasons for its becoming taboo need first to be understood and reassessed. This is the aim of the…
Emancipation as a Three‐Dimensional Process for the Twenty‐First Century
This article elicits two overlapping frameworks in which emancipation has been understood and applied to women. The first distinguishes between a) an original definition grounded in Roman Law and defined as release from slavery and b) an Enlightenment sense in which an emancipatory process is associated with a critical ethos. I derive this latter meaning from an analysis of Kant's and Foucault's respective essays on enlightenment. Although they a…
Encyclopedia of Political Thought
The Body and Politics
This article focuses on the concept of the body in political thought, which has been widely ignored. In gender studies, however, the body serves as a relevant dimension of politics. Some of the main approaches to the body in the field of gender studies were created by feminists, and emphasis has been placed on women’s embodiment. The article addresses the theoretical questions that arise when the (gendered–sexed) body is brought into political li…
Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences
In this article, I note that the idea of a new materialist turn has recently been gathering steam. The first part considers some of the signature elements of the new materialisms. The most distinctive aspect identified here is the invocation of a generative or vital ontology of immanence. Following discussion of some of its principal claims, the article draws out its implications for reconceptualising agency, in particular regarding the way agent…
Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
During the 1960s and early 1970s population growth was regarded as an urgent environmental issue. Since then the topic has fallen into abeyance. Despite continuing demographic expansion and anxieties about a range of socio-ecological problems – from the stresses of high-density urban living to climate change, water, energy and food insecurity and loss of biodiversity – there is currently scant consideration of the benefits of population stabilisa…
Population Growth in the UK: An Issue for Political Debate and Policy Intervention
Although population growth in the UK is currently arousing widespread popular concern, political scientists have tended to ignore the issue while political elites are manifestly reluctant to address it. In this article I consider a number of recent reports that both recognise the challenges posed by increasing numbers and ignore or reject the possibility of including a population dimension in policy responses. In particular, the article offers a …
Reconstructing the elderly: A critical analysis of pensions and population policies in an era of demographic ageing
Introducing the New Materialisms
Book synopsis: New Materialisms rethinks the relevance of materialist philosophy in the midst of a world shaped by forces such as digital and biotechnologies, global warming, global capital, and population flows. Moving away from modes of inquiry that have prioritized the study of consciousness and subjectivity over matter, the essays in this collection show that any account of experience, agency, and political action demands renewed attention to…
New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics
New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics
Repairing Civil Society and Experimenting with Power: A Genealogy of Social Capital
In this article my principal aims are to explain why the concept of social capital has proven so popular among policy makers and to develop a critical response to it. In order to do so I bring together macro- and micro-level analyses that focus, on the one hand, on broad structural changes associated with globalisation and, on the other, on specific attempts at increasing social capital within the everyday lives of communities. To develop my macr…
Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts
Experiencing Discourse: Corporeal Communicators and the Embodiment of Power
The importance of the body in social interactions has been largely ignored in political studies. Even when its significance is acknowledged, its material and experiential dimensions tend to be neglected. Commending a phenomenological sense of embodiment, I argue that this is a serious omission since there are many ways in which power operates on a corporeal level. I show in this article how the senses, although mediated by social and political st…
Politics, Power and Contingency: Judging Hutton and Responding to Mendus
My purpose in the article was twofold: to commend to political theorists a method of critical analysis that can usefully be applied to texts that circulate within public life, and to apply it myself in reading the Hutton Report. Like many people, I was incredulous when the report appeared and suspicious of its conclusions. But I was also curious as to how it managed to appear simultaneously both objective and biased. Consequently, I wanted to inv…
Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities
Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a pheno…
Agency, Truth and Meaning: Judging the Hutton Report
The Hutton Report is now established as an important element of Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. In this article the ideas that underpin it are analysed. In particular, the focus is on Hutton's presuppositions concerning the nature of truth, agency, subjectivity, meaning and language. It is shown how unquestioned assumptions structured his method and shaped his conclusions. Although such presuppositions are widely shared by the public, too,…
Politics without Nostalgia
Politics without Nostalgia Diana Coole (bio) Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). When Wendy Brown writes about ‘Politics out of History’ she does not mean an ahistorical politics, but a politics that has lost its mooring in History as a grand narrative of progress. She accordingly situates her work within that paradoxical space where modernity and postmodernity — structured history and po…
Untimely Politics
Untimely Politics
Philosophy as Political Engagement: Revisiting Merleau-Ponty and Reopening the Communist Question
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics From Kant to Poststructuralism
Cartographic Convulsions: Public and Private Reconsidered
I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time. Fredric Jameson The joyous disturbance of certain women's movements, and of some women in particular, has actually brought with it the chance for a certain risky turbulence in the assigning of places within our small European space.... Is one then going to st…
Threads and plaits or an unfinished project? Feminism(s) through the twentieth century
This article defines feminism's enduring aim as one of abolishing discrimination or exclusion on the basis of gender. From this perspective any reflection on the twentieth century must note its many successes in winning real gains for women. Yet developments within feminism itself problematize the way its history can now be recounted. The article considers two possible approaches. One presents feminism as an unfinished emancipatory project, an as…
Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences
In this article, I note that the idea of a new materialist turn has recently been gathering steam. The first part considers some of the signature elements of the new materialisms. The most distinctive aspect identified here is the invocation of a generative or vital ontology of immanence. Following discussion of some of its principal claims, the article draws out its implications for reconceptualising agency, in particular regarding the way agent…
Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities
Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a pheno…
Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory
Experiencing Discourse: Corporeal Communicators and the Embodiment of Power
The importance of the body in social interactions has been largely ignored in political studies. Even when its significance is acknowledged, its material and experiential dimensions tend to be neglected. Commending a phenomenological sense of embodiment, I argue that this is a serious omission since there are many ways in which power operates on a corporeal level. I show in this article how the senses, although mediated by social and political st…
Cartographic Convulsions: Public and Private Reconsidered
I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time. Fredric Jameson The joyous disturbance of certain women's movements, and of some women in particular, has actually brought with it the chance for a certain risky turbulence in the assigning of places within our small European space.... Is one then going to st…
Reconstructing the elderly: A critical analysis of pensions and population policies in an era of demographic ageing
Feminist political theory: An introduction
Agency, Truth and Meaning: Judging the Hutton Report
The Hutton Report is now established as an important element of Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. In this article the ideas that underpin it are analysed. In particular, the focus is on Hutton's presuppositions concerning the nature of truth, agency, subjectivity, meaning and language. It is shown how unquestioned assumptions structured his method and shaped his conclusions. Although such presuppositions are widely shared by the public, too,…
Repairing Civil Society and Experimenting with Power: A Genealogy of Social Capital
In this article my principal aims are to explain why the concept of social capital has proven so popular among policy makers and to develop a critical response to it. In order to do so I bring together macro- and micro-level analyses that focus, on the one hand, on broad structural changes associated with globalisation and, on the other, on specific attempts at increasing social capital within the everyday lives of communities. To develop my macr…
Threads and plaits or an unfinished project? Feminism(s) through the twentieth century
This article defines feminism's enduring aim as one of abolishing discrimination or exclusion on the basis of gender. From this perspective any reflection on the twentieth century must note its many successes in winning real gains for women. Yet developments within feminism itself problematize the way its history can now be recounted. The article considers two possible approaches. One presents feminism as an unfinished emancipatory project, an as…
Constructing and Deconstructing Liberty: A Feminist and Poststructuralist Analysis
Debates about liberty have been dominated by discussion about the relationship between its negative and positive conceptions. In accepting this framework, political theorists have left unquestioned certain foundational ideas that both concepts share but which actully constrain our thinking about freedom. This relates in particular to subjectivity and our assumptions about the free self. This critique uses feminist and poststructuralist approaches…
Emancipation as a Three‐Dimensional Process for the Twenty‐First Century
This article elicits two overlapping frameworks in which emancipation has been understood and applied to women. The first distinguishes between a) an original definition grounded in Roman Law and defined as release from slavery and b) an Enlightenment sense in which an emancipatory process is associated with a critical ethos. I derive this latter meaning from an analysis of Kant's and Foucault's respective essays on enlightenment. Although they a…
Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
During the 1960s and early 1970s population growth was regarded as an urgent environmental issue. Since then the topic has fallen into abeyance. Despite continuing demographic expansion and anxieties about a range of socio-ecological problems – from the stresses of high-density urban living to climate change, water, energy and food insecurity and loss of biodiversity – there is currently scant consideration of the benefits of population stabilisa…
Population Growth in the UK: An Issue for Political Debate and Policy Intervention
Although population growth in the UK is currently arousing widespread popular concern, political scientists have tended to ignore the issue while political elites are manifestly reluctant to address it. In this article I consider a number of recent reports that both recognise the challenges posed by increasing numbers and ignore or reject the possibility of including a population dimension in policy responses. In particular, the article offers a …
Whither Feminisms
The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier 1874-1939
Philosophy as Political Engagement: Revisiting Merleau-Ponty and Reopening the Communist Question
Wild differences and tamed others: Postmodernism and liberal democracy
(1996). Wild differences and tamed others: Postmodernism and liberal democracy. Parallax: Vol. 2, Theory/Practice, pp. 23-36
Modernity and its Other(s
Re-Reading Political Theory from a Woman's Perspective
Re-Reading Political Theory from a Woman's Perspective
Patriarchy & Contract: Reading Pateman
Modernity and its Other(s
Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity
Part 1 Introduction - defining postmodernity: modernity and postmodernity, Bryan S.Turner modernity, postmodernity and the present, Barry Smart. Part 2 Nostalgia and modernity: reading Wall Street - postmodern contradictions in the American social structure, Norman K.Denzin after nostalgia? wilful nostalgia and the phase of globalization, Roland Robertson postmoderism as humanism? urban space and social theory, Scott Las Simmel and the theory of …
The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier 1874-1939
Feminist political theory: An introduction
Constructing and Deconstructing Liberty: A Feminist and Poststructuralist Analysis
Debates about liberty have been dominated by discussion about the relationship between its negative and positive conceptions. In accepting this framework, political theorists have left unquestioned certain foundational ideas that both concepts share but which actully constrain our thinking about freedom. This relates in particular to subjectivity and our assumptions about the free self. This critique uses feminist and poststructuralist approaches…
Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory
Whither Feminisms
Wild differences and tamed others: Postmodernism and liberal democracy
(1996). Wild differences and tamed others: Postmodernism and liberal democracy. Parallax: Vol. 2, Theory/Practice, pp. 23-36
The Politics of Postmodernity
In his study Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman contrasts the hopes and expectations of the modernising world of the nineteenth century with the real outcomes of the twentieth century, where the very conditions of modernity have led to the mass destruction of humanity and of those early hopes for the betterment of humankind. This volume explores the possibilities left to those once modernising societies, not only in terms of the worlds t…
The Politics of Reading Nietzsche
Over recent years, an extraordinary number of interpretations of Nietzsche's work has appeared. I ask why he has become such an important figure in contemporary political debate and whether any dominant concerns can be elicited from the diverse readings of his texts. My response to both questions is that because Nietzsche has been identified, by Habermas among others, as the founding father of post-structuralism, this is where debate between post…
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics From Kant to Poststructuralism
Cartographic Convulsions: Public and Private Reconsidered
I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time. Fredric Jameson The joyous disturbance of certain women's movements, and of some women in particular, has actually brought with it the chance for a certain risky turbulence in the assigning of places within our small European space.... Is one then going to st…
Threads and plaits or an unfinished project? Feminism(s) through the twentieth century
This article defines feminism's enduring aim as one of abolishing discrimination or exclusion on the basis of gender. From this perspective any reflection on the twentieth century must note its many successes in winning real gains for women. Yet developments within feminism itself problematize the way its history can now be recounted. The article considers two possible approaches. One presents feminism as an unfinished emancipatory project, an as…
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism
Philosophy as Political Engagement: Revisiting Merleau-Ponty and Reopening the Communist Question
Politics without Nostalgia
Politics without Nostalgia Diana Coole (bio) Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). When Wendy Brown writes about ‘Politics out of History’ she does not mean an ahistorical politics, but a politics that has lost its mooring in History as a grand narrative of progress. She accordingly situates her work within that paradoxical space where modernity and postmodernity — structured history and po…
Untimely Politics
Untimely Politics
Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities
Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a pheno…
Agency, Truth and Meaning: Judging the Hutton Report
The Hutton Report is now established as an important element of Britain's involvement in the Iraq War. In this article the ideas that underpin it are analysed. In particular, the focus is on Hutton's presuppositions concerning the nature of truth, agency, subjectivity, meaning and language. It is shown how unquestioned assumptions structured his method and shaped his conclusions. Although such presuppositions are widely shared by the public, too,…
Experiencing Discourse: Corporeal Communicators and the Embodiment of Power
The importance of the body in social interactions has been largely ignored in political studies. Even when its significance is acknowledged, its material and experiential dimensions tend to be neglected. Commending a phenomenological sense of embodiment, I argue that this is a serious omission since there are many ways in which power operates on a corporeal level. I show in this article how the senses, although mediated by social and political st…
Politics, Power and Contingency: Judging Hutton and Responding to Mendus
My purpose in the article was twofold: to commend to political theorists a method of critical analysis that can usefully be applied to texts that circulate within public life, and to apply it myself in reading the Hutton Report. Like many people, I was incredulous when the report appeared and suspicious of its conclusions. But I was also curious as to how it managed to appear simultaneously both objective and biased. Consequently, I wanted to inv…
Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts
Political science (28 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)