Kent Law School Professor Davina Cooper has been awarded the Feminist Theory Annual Essay Prize 2016.
In selecting Professor Cooper’s essay ‘Bringing the state up conceptually: Forging a body politics through anti-gay Christian refusal’, the judge commended her “excellent scholarship.” The essay was shortlisted by the editors of Feminist Theory from amongst all essays submitted in 2015 before its selection for the prize by an external judge. The judge said the article was a pleasurable read, a feature that was noted as a “rare achievement and an immense strength.”
The editors and the judge acknowledged there had been lots of really strong articles published in the journal in 2015 but noted that Professor Cooper’s work had really stood out.
Feminist Theory is an international interdisciplinary journal engaged in debates about the diversity of feminism. It incorporates perspectives from across the broad spectrum of the humanities and social sciences and the full range of feminist political and theoretical stances. It seeks articles with a strong grounding in feminist theory from scholars of all levels and on a range of subjects.
Last year, Professor Cooper was awarded the Charles Taylor Book Award 2015 for her book Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. The annual award recognizes the best book in political science that employs or develops interpretive methodologies and methods and was made by the American Political Science Association (APSA).
Next month Professor Cooper will be hosting a two-day workshop interrogating the question of whether states have a place within a transformative progressive politics. The workshop, to be held on Kent’s Canterbury campus on 19/20 May, will offer participants the opportunity to reimagine the concept of the state for progressive politics.
Professor Cooper is Professor of Law and Political Theory at Kent Law School. Her main areas of research sit at the interstices of socio-legal studies, political theory, social diversity and the transformational potential of state and non-state sites. She has published widely on these themes in articles, book chapters and books over 20 years, including: Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference (2004); Governing out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (1998); Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality and the State (1995); and Sexing the City: Lesbian and Gay Politics within the Activist State (1994). Her most recent book, Everyday Utopias is published by Duke University Press.