Professor Kate Bedford

• PhD in Political Science (2005). Rutgers (New Jersey, USA).
  Major field: Women in Politics. Minor fields: Comparative Politics; Globalisation Studies.
• MA in Women’s Studies (2000). Ohio State University (Ohio, USA).
• BA Hons (1997). University of Leeds (UK). History and Sociology, with a specialisation in development studies.

I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in political economy, development, socio-legal studies, and gender/sexuality studies. I joined Birmingham Law School as a Professor of Law and Political Economy in 2018. I have taught widely, inside and outside universities. In law schools, I have taught courses in public law, law and development, law and transitional justice, and global law.  

I am a leading scholar of gambling law and regulation. In 2008, I began a project on the political economy of gambling regulation, using commercial and non-commercial bingo to think in new ways about the regulation of everyday speculation. Funded by a large ESRC grant (ES/J02385X/1, A Full House: Developing A New Socio-Legal Theory of Global Gambling Regulation), I led a team of researchers to explore bingo regulation around the world. My second book, Bingo Capitalism: The Law and Political  Economy of Everyday Gambling, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. It was awarded the 2020 Hart-SLSA book prize and the 2020 International Political Economy book prize of the British International Studies Association. I am currently co-leading an NIHR-funded project to develop an equitable public health approach to gambling harms. This assesses the intended and unintended effects of legal changes that aim to reduce gambling harm, in order to improve legal interventions in future. I also co-lead an evaluation of a innovative peer-led gambling harms intervention. My current research focuses on how public health law can more equitably address gambling harms.  

My other area of expertise is international development. My first book (Developing Partnerships: Gender, Sexuality and the Reformed World Bank, 2009) explored the World Bank’s gender and development lending in Latin America, with case studies of Ecuador and Argentina. More recently, I have researched the consequences of the turn to law within gender and development lending. Using ride-hailing firms as a case study, I have analysed the regulatory recommendations stemming from corporate involvement in gender research. I have also produced commissioned research for UN Women’s recent work on gender and social norms which explores the role of law reform in social norms change. My development research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, Overbrook Foundation, UNRISD, UN Women, and RCUK.

I currently lead the LLB law dissertation module and the Legal Systems of the World module, and I co-lead the LLM Introduction to Legal Research module.

I am due to teach Critical Sports Law (I module I co-developed) in future. I have taught several other modules in the LLB Global Law programme, including Global Law and Globalisation and Contemporary Issues in International Law.

I have also taught Public Law, Gender and the Law, and Law and Development (LLB and LLM), and I have research expertise in law and political economy. If you wish to write an under-graduate or LLM dissertation in those areas, feel free to get in touch.

I am happy to read PhD proposals in the following areas:

• Gambling law and regulation
• Law and development (especially related to the World Bank/to Latin America)
• Gender, sexuality, and law.

Find out more - our PhD Law  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research focuses on how law, regulation, and governance shape economies, societies, and communities.

One strand of my research is on gambling law and regulation. I am currently co-leading an NIHR-funded project to develop an equitable public health approach to gambling harms. This assesses the intended and unintended effects of legal changes that aim to reduce gambling harm, in order to improve legal interventions in future. I also co-lead an evaluation of a innovative peer-led gambling harms intervention. As part of my interest in how public health law can more equitably address gambling harms, I have published an analysis of the implications of the 2023 White paper on gambling law reform. This explores how vulnerability is poorly understood in current law, and how ‘safer gambling technologies’ may put people at risk.

I have also researched the law and regulation of bingo. Critical political economists have long used gambling to think through capitalism, but they tend to do so via analogies with casinos. I am interested in other, differently gendered, differently raced, differently classed, more ordinary gambling forms. I am especially interested in bingo, a lottery-style game popular in many parts of the world about which there is almost no academic research, and certainly not in law. Bingo has a very different demographic to casinos, being especially popular with older, working class women, and, in North America and Australia, with Indigenous peoples. In addition, bingo is intriguing because it is associated with mutual aid and charitable fundraising as much as, if not more than, commercial gambling in many places. I wanted to know what impact that mix had on regulatory priorities in different places, and what that in turn could teach us about the political economy of gambling regulation. After some pilot projects in England and Canada, in 2013 I was awarded a large ESRC grant to research the comparative regulation of bingo. The research team I led generated a number of academic and non-academic outputs, including a public debate about bingo regulation in the UK, and major policy report exploring Brazil, the UK, the EU, and Canada (The Bingo Project). I also submitted evidence from the research to the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, as part of their policy work on responsible gambling and online gambling. My academic monograph on what bingo can teach us about regulating capitalism won the 2020 Hart-SLSA book prize and the 2020 International Political Economy book prize of the British International Studies Association.

The second strand of my research is on law, gender, and development. For example, I have analysed what early debates about gender and development said about law, in an effort to improve our histories of law and development. Working with academics in Ecuador, I have explored the role of criminal law within Ecuadorian attempts to combat domestic violence. I am current exploring the role of gender and law in the World Bank's work to combat non-communicable diseases, including as related to alcohol. 

In 2009 I published a book exploring the impact of the World Bank’s development lending on gender and sexuality, with case studies of Ecuador and Argentina. Rather than exploring areas of lending that were already marked as being about sex, such as HIV/AIDS or reproductive health, I analysed lending that seemed to be about other things, such as export promotion in floriculture, or institutional strengthening in the aftermath of economic crisis. The book showed how multi-lateral development institutions like the Bank played a key role in shaping gender and sexuality in the Global South. It called for much greater debate about this on the part of academics and development practitioners. As a result of this work, I was invited by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development to write a report on care debates in the UN, which looked at sexuality and disability. In 2014, in the aftermath of World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s critique of Uganda for passing anti-gay legislation, I was invited to the Bank to give a presentation on sexuality and development. My research has also been used by Sexuality Policy Watch, a global sexual rights organisation, and by the gender team in the Bretton Woods Project, an organisation that monitors the Bank and the International Monetary Fund.