Matthew Abbey
- Position: Lecturer in Critical Human Geography
- Areas of expertise: Critical Human Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Queer Theory, Border Studies, Surveillance Studies.
- Email: M.W.Abbey@leeds.ac.uk
- Location: 10.144 Irene Manton Building
- Website: ORCID
Profile
Dr. Matthew Abbey is lecturer in critical human geography at the University of Leeds. His research explores theories, forms, and practices of subjectivity, space, violence, and technology. Drawing on case studies about bordering, surveillance, policing, counterterrorism, and geopolitics from the British and European colonial present, he investigates social hauntings, narrative silences, queer performance, counter-archiving, fantasy, the imagination, the unconscious, desire, sexuality, neurodiversity, nonchronological time, and marginal futurities in relation to the technological risk society and its quantification of social life.
Matthew’s first manuscript Queer Migration at the Colonial Borders of Europe is forthcoming with Bristol University Press. His other writing can be found in Theory, Culture, & Society, Social Text, Surveillance & Society, Sexualities, Identities, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and Porn Studies, as well as media outlets such as The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and openDemocracy.
Matthew is currently working on three strands of research. First, he is developing a monograph that rethinks dominant understandings of surveillance and its harms, using psychoanalysis to challenge the positivist value given to data within the political economy of surveillance. Second, he is writing a series of articles about the use of anticipation, prediction, and speculation in geopolitics, using nonchronological approaches to time to query how ideas of the future impact the present and vice versa. Third, he is developing a project on the growing effort to understand the brain within state security post 9/11, using neurodiversity studies to interrogate what this means for pathologised forms of cognition, perception, and affect, while also examining how neurodivergence can make the familiarity of violence strange.
Qualifications
- PhD, University of Warwick
- MA, Sciences Po Paris
- BA, Monash University
Professional memberships
- British Sociological Association
- Associate Fellowship at Advance HE
Student education
Matthew is very open to supervising PhD students in the above areas of interest, as well as related topics in critical human geography more broadly. He is also actively seeking PhD students working on artificial intelligence and social justice.
Research groups and institutes
- Research and innovation
- Social Justice, Cities, Citizenship