Professor Gina Heathcote was conferred to the Fellowship of the Academy in spring 2026. She is Professor of Public International Law at Newcastle Law School, and her work examines the power of feminist, gender, and queer methodologies to rethink law and legal relations beyond the experience of gendered subjects or gendered identity.
Professor Gina HeathcoteFAcSS
Gina’s work extends across the study of collective security, feminist and queer legal methodologies, and ocean governance. This has included the in-depth study of the international law on the use of force from a feminist perspective, the study of the foundations of international law and, more recently, gender analysis of the international law of the sea.
Gina’s research engages and examines the ways in which gender, law and violence are constituted; drawing on interdisciplinary tools to expose the way law reproduces privilege and rewards elite actors at the cost of communities whose access to law, and law-making, is limited. Gina’s work on feminist methodologies within international law draws on non-legal work on queer lives, on gender, on disability and debility, on expertise, on authority and on the nonhuman to question the ways in which legal subjects are imagined as aligned with specific social and cultural realities. Her work contributes and expands understandings of queer feminist peace and the need for laws that build stronger and safer societies for all.
Gina is a founding editor of the Routledge Series on Feminist and Queer International Law and together with co-editor Dr Tamsin Paige, has developed the series as a space for cutting-edge work on international law that challenges received thinking, with a specific focus on championing new voices.
Why do the social sciences matter?
As a legal scholar who has always worked with interdisciplinary analytical tools, working in the social sciences has allowed me to think beyond traditional legal methodologies and inspired me to investigate how law is lived and experienced in the everyday.
What do you enjoy most about your work?
My research has allowed me to meet practitioners, policy actors and academics across diverse contexts globally. These encounters have opened my research to investigating the ways in which laws are given social meaning, encouraged me to explore the capacity for – and consequences of – law reform for individuals and communities, and given me tools to challenge assumptions about law and legal reasoning. The social sciences and socio-legal work has been central to giving me a frame to undertake research that is not confined by disciplinary expectations, while offering me tools for working with amazing academic and non-academic peers globally.
What is the most urgent issue social scientists need to tackle today and within the next three years?
Urgent issues, sadly, abound; from climate change to rising populism, to new sites of state violence, expanding inequalities and abuses of power. To respond to the world as it is now, we need social scientists that are not afraid to think the world anew and to provide signposts for ending violence, whether against the earth and the non-human, or against other humans. This is the pressing issue for us all: not to despair and not to give up on the innovative and world-changing ways of thinking that we already know, even in times of scarcity, division and violence.
What does being a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences mean to you?
The Academy is rich in the Fellows it has elected. I am proud to join such an esteemed community of peers. Election to the Academy has encouraged me to think and reflect on how the social sciences shape and inform social change, including legal possibilities, for futures that are inclusive, communities that are resilient, and models of society that centre care and community.