Bio

Davina Cooper is Research Professor in Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law. From 2004-17, Davina was Professor of Law and Political Theory at the University of Kent. Between 2004 and 2009, she directed the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender & Sexuality. Professor Cooper’s interdisciplinary research approaches questions of transformative politics – their possibilities, limits, and conflicts – as these take shape in relation to law, the state, experiments in living, gender and sexuality, and cultural diversity. As well as addressing the challenges which governing beyond the conventional ‘order’ generates, her work also focuses on bringing new conceptual thinking to contemporary innovative spaces and politics, and in turn works from these sites to explore new ways of thinking about core socio-legal and political concepts, including the state, power, care, and equality.Her most recent book project considers new ways of thinking about the state, focusing on the state’s capacity to support progressive transformative politics. This project takes as its empirical ground the transnational struggle currently taking shape over conservative Christian refusal to support gay-positive initiatives.Her blog ‘Social Politics and stuff’ is available here: https://davinascooper.wordpress.com/