How concepts do activism: as worlds, aids, cells, and currents

What is conceptual activism and how should we understand the form and affordances of the concept as it takes shape within it? Drawing on interviews with twenty-three interdisciplinary academics, along with social theoretical and empirical research, this article offers an onto-methodological approach to the concept, focused on the work of concepts (qua concepts) in critical, prefigurative, campaigning and counter-institutional projects. Foregrounding the materiality of the concept, the discussion focuses on four figures through which the concept assumes shape: the aid, world, animate cell and current. While the ‘aid’ (or ‘tool’) is a familiar conceptual figure, concerned with the different ways that concepts get used – to know, act, stimulate, etc., the others are less familiar. In this article, the ‘world’ reveals how concepts are inhabited as people enter, move around, cultivate and care for them. The ‘cell’ reveals how concepts move and thrive, live, fight and die, cluster and disperse. The ‘current’ reveals how concepts exert a force that ebbs and alters, impacting on those who intentionally or otherwise get caught up in it. Tracing these different figures shows how concepts are inhabited, used, observed and felt within conceptual activism. However, aids, worlds, cells and currents are not discrete and distinct conceptual existences, nor is one (or other) better at explaining what concepts are. Rather, these figures combine in different patterns, including sequentially, and the concept qua concept acquires shape as it occupies and travels between them.