Adam Cooper

Adam Cooper is a Chief Research Specialist in the HSRC's Equitable Education and Economies research division. He holds a PhD degree in education policy studies from Stellenbosch University. Cooper specialises in the sociologies of education and youth, looking at how young people navigate various social challenges between education and work, shaped by race, class, gender, age, language and spatial relations. Before joining the HSRC, Cooper worked at the Extra-Mural Education Project, a non-profit organisation that worked with schools in low-income communities to develop these schools as hubs of their communities through extra-murals. At the HSRC he has worked on projects related to public-private education partnerships, parent involvement in schools and a multi-year, multi-country study of young African scholarship recipients’ transitions from education into the world of work. He hosted eight Young African Research Fellows for two years at the HSRC, as part of that project, co-creating a podcast series called Hustling the African Dream and making a virtual museum that documented challenges to African youth generating livelihoods.
Cooper is on the editorial committee of the Journal of Education (UKZN) and the editorial board of the Journal of Youth Studies. He wrote a sole-authored book, Dialogue in Places of Learning: Youth Amplified from South Africa, which was published by Routledge, London in 2017 and co-authored Studying While Black: Race, education and emancipation in South African universities ( HSRC Press, 2018). He is a co-editor of the Oxford University Press Handbook of Global South Youth Studies (2021), Learning for livelihoods in the global south: theoretical and methodological lenses on skills and the informal sector (Routledge, 2025) and Parent and caregiver involvement in South African education (HSRC Press, 2025).