School of Social and Political Science

Background

Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at sites of criminal justice reform, mental health clinics, and homeless encampments in the San Francisco Bay Area, my research explores connections and disjunctures between systems of inequality, care, and social justice. Rather than rely on structural explanations for persistent racism and poverty in the United States, I examine how intimate socialities manage to refract, reify, and also refuse coordinates of broader systems of social inequality. My first ethnographic book project, Unaccountable: Lapses of Liberalism in California’s Mental Health Courts, explores the ways in which relationships between criminal justice professionals and their clients unravel state power by accessing an ethical space excessive of the individualising discourse of liberal responsibility. Drawing on observations of and participation in relationships among staff, clients, and clients' families in mental health courts, Unaccountable explores emergent ethics elicited by the demand to provide care for mentally ill individuals as a project of social justice amidst absent state services and vast material inequalities. Throughout, I tack between ethnographic and psychoanalytic theory to achieve a position apart from the tenets of liberalism to critique the workings of the American state. My research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Society for Psychological Anthropology/Lemelson Foundation, and the Center for Health and Wellbeing and Program in American Studies at Princeton University. I received my PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University.

You can read more about my research at www.jmcooper.uk.

Teaching & Programme Administration

From August 2025, I will be the Programme Director for our Postgraduate Taught (PGT) MSc in Medical Anthropolgy. Please feel free to contact me with any enquiries about the programme.

I teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses across Social Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and Global Mental Health degree programmes. Please see below for information about some of these courses.

Anthropology of Health and Healing (UG, honours) - from Autumn 2025

Anthropology of Health and Illness (PG) - from Autumn 2025

Anthropology and Psychoanalysis (UG, honors) - Autumn 2024

At first glance, psychoanalytic and ethnographic methods and concerns have much in common. Both fields are interested in subjectivity as the interplay between internal and social worlds. Both rely on listening as part of their core methodologies. Both profess humanistic concerns about the people with whom practitioners work (their interlocutors, research participants, informants, clients, patients, or analysands). Both fields have as their central preoccupation the question, “What can social theory learn from human experience?” And yet, despite these similarities, social anthropology and psychoanalysis respond dramatically differently to the question posed, partly due to differences in how the field conceptualise human experience itself. For ethnographers, experience is at the crux of practitioners’ methodology. For analysts, it is always only ever symptom.

This seminar takes up the synergies and discrepancies across social anthropology and psychoanalysis as a comparative project: what can we learn about the commitments, opportunities, and foreclosures of each field by working with the two in tandem? We will work with psychoanalysis as a field of inquiry that takes seriously the unconscious, unreason, and the repressed as socially inflected psychic phenomena that bear on human behaviour and relations. We will use this comparative project as the basis for approaching questions about subjectivity, representation, method, and ethics. For example, how might ethnographers engage with the psychoanalytic premise that some human experience is beyond representation? And how might psychoanalysts engage with an anthropological commitment to cultural difference? We will build out a comparative approach to ask wide reaching questions about the nature of representation, knowledge, and the psyche in both fields, to consider the implications for politics and ethics. 

Culture and Mental Health in a Global Perspective - Spring 2021

All around the world, mental health and wellbeing have emerged as important welfare and policy concerns. As promoted through organisations of international governance, much of this concern is expressed in the language of biomedicalized mental illness, with an emphasis on psychiatric knowledge, evidence-based modelling, and the use of psychopharmaceuticals to treat psychological distress. Culture & Mental Health in a Global Perspective contextualises and particularises this approach to psychological distress so as to interrogate the politics, ethics, and epistemologies that it promotes. In so doing, we bring other approaches to psychological distress from around the world and individuals’ and communities’ experiences of psychic instability to the fore, all the while examining where tensions, frictions, and overlapping commitments are found. We consider the diversity of personal and cultural understandings of what constitutes ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ and strive to understand the complex social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics that shape experiences of and approaches to psychological distress.

Culture & Mental Health in a Global Perspective is a course that I developed with  Lotte Buch Segal and taught in Spring 2021. It is a graduate seminar and a required course for Edinburgh’s MSc in Global Mental Health.

Culture and Power (UG, honours; PG) - Autumn 2023

How can we possibly make sense of categories as large as ‘culture’ and ‘power’? This course works to register and theorise the impossibility of disaggregating these two domains (h/t Foucault). Starting with the premise that power works through culture and culture works through power, students on Culture & Power explore the copresence of these phenomena across institutional and intimate spaces. Through micro-ethnographic work and close readings, students query how intimate articulations of power simultaneously reflect and challenge the institutional, and vice versa.

Culture & Power has both undergraduate and postgraduate versions, both of which I taught and convened during the 2023-2024 academic year. 

Ethnographies of the United States (UG, honours; PG) - from Spring 2023

This is a reading-intensive course that explores themes and provocations emergent from a range of ethnographies written about the USA or about places within the USA. It looks at how historical regimes and critical events, from slavery and the Civil War, 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina have influenced US society. It unpacks ethnographies that both describe and problematize the idea of ‘the everyday’ and the coherence of American culture. 

Students discuss and challenge concepts that have been central to constitutional, political, and quotidian discussions and conflicts about what the US is or about what various groups think it should be — justice, ‘family’, happiness, democracy — and assess the centrality of individuality and capitalism to American social norms in specific contexts. Considerations of American investments in individualism and capitalism run throughout the seminar. At the end of the semester, students are invited to write a term paper putting key seminar themes and questions in conversation with an American reality television of their choosing.

Ethnographies of the United States is a joint honours undergraduate and graduate seminar that I have developed and teach with  Siobhan Magee.

Introduction to Social Anthropology (UG, pre-honours) - from Autumn 2019

Introduction to Social Anthropology is, as you might expect, an introduction to the field. It is a large, undergraduate lecture course. The course does not aspire to provide an overview of all of the various subfields of the discipline, but rather to model methods of inquiry — to teach students the practice of thinking like an anthropologist. Students practice these skills in moving through a comparative study of aspects of the life course, including topics such as birth, adolescence, making a home, marriage, work, health, and death.

The Ethnography Seminar (PG) - Spring 2021, 2023, 2024

The Ethnography Seminar introduces students to ethnography as a distinctive form of research and writing. Through a series of close and critical readings of ethnographic texts, students will develop an appreciation of how anthropologists author understandings of other people and their lives through the experience of ‘being there.’

The Ethnography Seminar is a required postgraduate course for Edinburgh’s MSc in Social Anthropology. I have taught on and convened the course during Spring 2021, 2023, and 2024 terms.