Joe joined Loughborough in 2025 as a Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. Joe completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2022.
Joe works on the politics of alternative futures, from the utopian to the apocalyptic. He has published on these issues in a range of academic journals, including the American Political Science Review, Political Studies, Environmental Politics, and WIREs Climate Change. He is the author of the book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times, published by the MIT Press.
Joe was the winner of the 2025 British and Irish Association for Political Thought Early Career Prize. He is also a member of The Sociological Review editorial board.
Joe is a political theorist. His book, Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026), focuses on radical visions of new and better worlds in a moment of profound pessimism. Examining examples of Black, feminist and green utopianism, the book considers the survival strategies of utopia—that is, the tactics deployed by utopian thinkers and writers to keep the desire for a better world alive when everything tends towards dystopia.
More recently, he has been working on the role of apocalyptic visions in politics. He has argued for the value of imagining extreme scenarios of climate change in “Climate Catastrophe” in WIREs Climate Change, considered how oppressed groups use visions of the end of the world to challenge injustice in “The Apocalypse from Below” in the American Political Science Review, and reflected on the value of rethinking democracy in apocalyptic terms in “Apocalyptic Democracy” in Political Studies.
At Loughborough, he is working on a project on contemporary climate activism, studying how groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil use accounts of apocalyptic futures to justify militant protest in the present.
Joe’s teaching has covered a range of issues, including the history of social and political thought, the politics of climate change, and race and colonialism.
- Davidson, J. P. L. Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026)
- Davidson, J. P. L. (2025) “Apocalyptic democracy.” Political Studies. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1177/00323217251347367.
- Davidson, J. P. L. (2025) “Natal protest: The politics of the birth strike.” European Journal of Political Theory. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1177/14748851241305028.
- Davidson, J. P. L. (2025) “The apocalypse from below.” American Political Science Review 119(1): 479-491.
- Davidson, J. P. L. and Gavris, M. (2025). “Towards a degrowth transition: Bringing interests back in.” New Political Economy 30(1): 48-61.
- Davidson, J. P. L., and Kemp, L. (2024). “Climate catastrophe: The value of envisioning the worst-case scenarios of climate change.” WIREs Climate Change, 15(2), e871
- Davidson, J. P. L. (2023). “Two cheers for collapse? On the uses and abuses of the societal collapse thesis for imagining Anthropocene futures.” Environmental Politics, 32(6), 969-987.
- Davidson, J. P. L. and da Silva, F. C. (2022). “Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures, and Black social thought.” European Journal of Social Theory, 25(4), 521-538.