Research excellence at Kent Law School has been rewarded in this year’s University Research Prizes with an Advanced Research Prize for Professor Davina Cooper and a Consolidator Research Prize for The Bingo Project team comprising Dr Kate Bedford, Dr Donal Casey, Professor Toni Williams and Ms Luiza Jobim.
The Advanced Research Prize stipulates that nominees must be leaders in their respective field of research and must demonstrate significant achievement in the last 10 years. Professor Cooper was awarded the Faculty of Social Sciences Prize for Advanced Research in recognition of work undertaken for her project ‘Transformative concepts: A methodological and political challenge.’
In her nomination for Professor Cooper, Head of Kent Law School Professor Williams said: ‘Davina’s path-breaking scholarship over the past 14 years here at Kent has consolidated her position as a highly influential and visionary thinker with unique capabilities to advance conceptual thinking on current debates in politics, law, social justice, and equalities.’
Professor Cooper’s work involves exploring how alternative ways of living can help us to understand social life, equality, and the role of the state. Supported by extensive empirical socio-legal research over nine years, the project provides new conceptual tools for scholarly enquiry that are likely to have a significant and long-lasting impact across a range of disciplines including law, politics, geography and sociology. The project has resulted in an internationally acclaimed book Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Duke University Press, 2014); 14 articles in highly regarded international peer reviewed journals; a contract for a further book with Duke University Press for the next phase of the project (Feeling like a State: Political Withdrawal and the Transformative Imagination); a wide range of public engagement activities, including BBC radio, Bristol Festival of Ideas, and the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and translations into other languages. Professor Cooper has also been awarded two significant prizes for her work: the 2015 American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor book prize (for Everyday Utopias) and the 2016 Feminist Theory essay prize (for ‘Bringing the State Up Conceptually’).
The Faculty of Social Sciences Prize for Consolidator Research was awarded to the Bingo Project Team in recognition of the quality of their outputs and the international impact of their research on gambling regulation around the world.
The three-year project led by Dr Bedford was funded by a £0.5m grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), one of the five largest grants ever won by Kent Law School, and the third highest award in law given by the ESRC since 2012. It used bingo to fundamentally transform thinking about political economy, gender, charity, and the role of speculative play within everyday life and conducted four case studies of bingo regulation in Brazil, England and Wales, Canada, and the European Union.
In nominating the team, Co-Director of Research at Kent Law School Dr Emilie Cloatre, praised their work in demonstrating how socio-legal research excellence could significantly challenge pre-existing knowledge and policy strategies on an international scale: ‘The Bingo Project has made a very significant contribution to Kent Law School, and to the University. This contribution comes from the ambitious vision that underlies it; its international dimension; the innovative interventions it has made in several disciplines through high-quality outputs; and its impact on policy and regulation in several jurisdictions. Projects of this scale are exceptional in law. It is also rare to find such a degree of both scholarly and policy ambitiousness in a project.
‘The Bingo Project is an excellent example, of how vision, effective leadership, and the dedication of all members of a team make large projects successful. Dr Bedford led the project with skill and dedication, and ensured that the ambitious vision she had for the project, in terms of its outputs and impact was not only met, but exceeded (for example by producing even wider datasets and more outputs than initially committed).’
The Research Prizes were launched in Kent’s fiftieth anniversary year to celebrate excellence of research across all three faculties. This year, 44 applications were received and the winners were selected by a panel led by Kent’s Deputy-Vice-Chancellor Research & Innovation Professor Philippe De Wilde and including the Faculty Associate Deans (Research and Innovation), the Dean of the Graduate School, the Director of Corporate Communicaitons and the Director of Research Services.
Kent Law School has an international reputation for the quality of its research; the School is ranked 8th in the UK for research intensity (and 7th in the UK for research power) in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. Almost all (99%) of the research submitted to the REF was judged to be of international quality and the School’s environment was judged to be conducive to supporting the development of world-leading research.