معرفی
Jess Cooper is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh's School of Social and Political Science. Her research bridges ethnographic fieldwork with psychoanalytic theory, focusing on mental health systems, criminal justice reform, and ethical relations within contexts of social inequality. From August 2025, she will serve as Programme Director for the university's MSc in Medical Anthropology program.
Her educational background includes:
- PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University
- Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and Anthropology at Cornell University
- Member of Cornell University's Society of Fellows
Cooper's research explores how intimate socialities manage to refract, reify, and refuse coordinates of broader systems of social inequality, particularly through fieldwork conducted at sites of criminal justice reform, mental health clinics, and homeless encampments in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rather than relying on structural explanations for persistent racism and poverty in the United States, her work examines ethical relations emerging within contexts of care and governance. Her first ethnographic book project, Unaccountable: Lapses of Liberalism in California's Mental Health Courts, investigates how relationships between criminal justice professionals and their clients access ethical spaces excessive of liberal responsibility discourse.
Her publication portfolio demonstrates consistent engagement with the intersections of law, mental health, and psychoanalytic theory, with recent work examining mental health clinics, legal systems, and the ethical dilemmas inherent in care provision within contexts of state withdrawal. The research shows increasing methodological sophistication in blending ethnographic observation with psychoanalytic frameworks to examine subjectivity within institutional settings.
Her notable recognition includes:
- Cornell Society for the Humanities Interdisciplinary Writing Fellowship (2019)
Cooper actively supervises doctoral and master's students across multiple programs including MA Social Anthropology, MSc Medical Anthropology, and MSc Global Mental Health. She currently supervises three PhD candidates working on projects related to abortion liberalization in Ireland, community organizing around insecurity in the United States, and meaning-making in psychosis in the UK. Her research has been generously supported by prestigious organizations including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council for Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Society for Psychological Anthropology/Lemelson Foundation.
She is currently co-investigator on two major research projects: 'Law and Affect in Times of Crisis' (2023-2025), examining emotional dimensions of legal processes during societal disruptions, and 'Orders of Feeling and Economies of Solidarity' (2021-2023), which investigated relationships between work, health systems, and well-being across five European countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
