We are very happy to announce that Dr Joe Davidson has been awarded the BIAPT Early-Career Prize for 2025. Following completion of his PhD at King’s College (2022), Cambridge, Davidson won a highly competitive Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Warwick (2022-2025) and has recently begun a prestigious Vice-Chancellor’s Independent Research Fellowship at Loughborough University.
Davidson’s research and teaching focuses principally on the social theory of the future, analysing both utopian accounts of better worlds and apocalyptic visions of the end of everything. His diverse body of written work has both contemporary and historical focal points, ranging from political responses to the contemporary climate crisis to mid-twentieth century anticolonial analyses of economic relations.
In his forthcoming monograph, Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026), Davidson addresses the remarkable absence of utopia from the contemporary cultural landscape. Through analysis of the nature of and challenges faced by the literary tradition itself, he makes the case for the importance of utopian narratives, especially in times of profound political pessimism. He unpacks the political power of the valuable but rare contemporary utopian stories in Black, feminist, and green thought amid contexts of violence, oppression, and democratic imperilment. Saving Utopia will make an original and urgent contribution to contemporary political theory.
In addition to his path-breaking monograph, Davidson has also published numerous significant articles in world-leading journals, including American Political Science Review, Political Studies, Environmental Politics, and Feminist Theory. The subjects and texts that he covers in these articles are many and various, making unique and powerful contributions to different scholarly conversations across politics, sociology and related disciplines.
As well as developing such a large and impressively dextrous research portfolio of publications that are already shaping scholarly discussions, Dr Davidson has demonstrated a commitment to innovative teaching, leading modules that immerse both undergraduate and postgraduate students in myriad literatures that expand the canon of political thought. His ‘Decolonising Ecology’ module – taught at Warwick – provides an exemplary exposure of students to anti-colonial and indigenous texts through a specific focus on contemporary environmentalism.
Upon receipt of the award, Dr Davidson said ‘I am delighted to be awarded the BIAPT Early-Career Prize. It is an honour to have been recognised by the judges, and I am grateful to them for considering my work. A huge thank you to my mentors, colleagues and coauthors who have supported my research over the years’.