Professor Davina Cooper

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.

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).

From 2004-2009, she directed the AHRC Research Centre in Law, Gender and Sexuality (based at the universities of Kent, Keele and Westminster); from 2000-2003, she was Research Dean for the Social Science Faculty at Keele.

She has been a specialist advisor to the Education and Employment Parliamentary Select Committee, a magistrate, and a local London councillor. She is a founding editor of the interdisciplinary Routledge book series, Social Justice.

She is an elected Fellow of the British Academy and elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

PhD supervisions

Yes, Davina is accepting PhD supervisions.

Membership of professional bodies

• SLSA
• LSA
• BA (fellow)
• AcSS (fellow)

Research interests

Davina Cooper’s research over the past 30 years combines two primary interdisciplinary areas. The first concerns conceptual innovation and the methodologies to support new conceptual thinking. Specifically, here, her work explores re-conceptualisations of the state, gender, property, and equality through a diverse range of research methods, including qualitative fieldwork, caselaw, and simulations of state and legislative practice.

Her second area of research addresses radical, utopian, and transgressive forms of state and non-state governance, from everyday utopias to municipal state activism, paying particular attention to governance innovations and conflicts to do with gender, sexuality, and religion.

Davina Cooper's recent published research addresses:

• how sex and gender are treated in equality law and the possibilities for reimagining sex and gender through equality law 'thoughtways' developed for religion and disability
• what would abolishing legal sex/ gender status look like, the implications of this move, and its "soft" development through policy and practice
• the challenge of prefigurative and DIY law reform proposals
• the social conflict over how to conceptualise sex and gender
• developing state and non-state innovations that "prefigure" their wider future take-up
• reimagining what it could mean to be a state as a transformative progressive concept
• local goverenment boycotts and municipal state activism
• prefiguring the state
• simulating state instititions-with-revisions through play

Teaching interests

• Conceptual research methods
• Law & utopia
• Law & political theory
• Gender, sexuality and the law
• Advanced public law

PURE profile 

For more information on Professor Cooper's research, visit our research portal.