Davina Cooper is Research Professor in Law at King's College, London, having previously worked at Keele and Kent universities. Her work engages issues 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. Her research and writing explore 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 publications include Governing out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging(1998); Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference(2010); Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces(2014); and Feeling Like a State: Political Withdrawal and the Transformative Imagination(2019). With Nikita Dhawan and Janet Newman she is editing a collection on Reimagining the State(2019).

I first met Davina in 1989 to explore our mutual interest in processes and relations of governing (after Governing out of Order came out). We have continued to find things to talk about around issues of power, politics, states and the possibilities of thinking and doing ‘otherwise’. I like the way she is consistently imaginative and inspiring.

Her university web page provides more details: https://kclpure.kcl. ac.uk/portal/en/persons/davina-cooper(01148c13-6cd0-4a19-92ea-267acefee0f0)/biography.html.

This conversation was recorded in London on 10 July 2017.

Themes and topics

• • In a world of disciplines?

• • Thinking beyond boundaries

• • The consequences of talking to people

• • Emerging projects and emerging identities

In a world of disciplines?

[0:00:00]

John: What I wanted to start with was where you think you fit in a world of disciplines. I know you are in a school of law, and I know you know about law, but you are, I don't know, what is the word, I am going to say, more mobile than that, that is the nice version. So just where do you think from?

Davina: It is a good question, because when I started off I would have probably said I was a political theorist or an interdisciplinary political theorist, and my PhD focused on a political theory question.