In early work he contrasted rules and rituals of territoriality with protocols of public propriety as two complimentary forms of civic stake holding. In more recent work this model has been refined, drawing on the ideas of Michael Balint and Jay Appleton to outline a psychosocial geography of place attachment. Cohen’s interest in this field originated with the publication of his memoir, "Reading Room Only" in 2013 and has been focused on the forms of public commemoration which the Left mobilises and how this relates to the dominant apparatus of fame. In "Archive that, Comrade", he develops a model of archival genres and explores the forms of organisation that might be appropriate for the ‘anarchive’ that sets out to challenge or disrupt dominant knowledge power relations. The commemorations of the 50th anniversary of May 1968 provided an occasion for a further reflection of on the nature of political legacy and the organisation of a conference focused around that theme. One of Cohen’s major pre-occupations is the impact of de-industrialisation on working class community in Britain, especially on its cultures of masculinity and manual labour. His approach to labour history focuses on the split representation of the labouring body into Promethean and abject images, and how this in turn positions communities of labour as either backbones of the nation or a race apart. He argues that these fundamental binaries can either cut across or reinforce more familiar distinctions of occupational skill and moral status. In some of his research he has traced the evolution of these representations within specific social groups especially those who perform ‘elemental’ labour: miners, tunnellers, sweeps, mariners, foundry workers and roustabouts. Starting from a critique of reductive psychologies of racism, which reduce it to patterns of prejudice, or individual pathology, Cohen looked for the social structures and cultural norms through which Freud's concept of ‘narcissism of minor difference’ might become racialised. He found these in the autochthonies which feature in myths of origin operating in discourses of nation, people , and race. Cohen argues that it is through these ‘perversions of inheritance’ that the racist imagination gains its purchase on the real and becomes 'common sense'. If the unconscious is the 'discourse of the other' (Lacan) then unconscious racism is the 'discourse of the other’s discourse of the other'. Cohen argued that It follows that rationalist pedagogies favoured by anti-racists are doomed to failure since they fail to engage with the structures of disavowal which are intrinsic to racialised structures of feeling and belief.