Matthew Abbey

Profile

I am a Lecturer in Critical Human Geography at the University of Leeds. My research focuses on state violence, border regimes, the colonial present, artificial intelligence, queer theory, and the politics of knowledge. I previously completed my PhD at the University of Warwick. My forthcoming book Queer Migration at the Colonial Borders of Europe is forthcoming with Bristol University Press in 2027. Some of my forthcoming and published articles can be found in Theory, Culture, & Society; Social Text; Surveillance & Society; Sexualities; Identities; European Journal of Cultural Studies; Visual Studies; and Porn Studies.

My next project investigates how European governments, humanitarian organisations, and political activists develop, act upon, and defend their reliance on future-oriented knowledge in the context of geopolitics. It highlights the forms of speculation, anticipation, and imagination that shape the strategies they employ to govern or intervene in the management of borders, security, and climate change. By analysing these strategies alongside a reconsideration of the grammar of chronology, the project seeks to unsettle the frameworks, logics, and superimpositions through which the future’s impact on the present is conventionally understood, opening new ways to conceptualise time and space in relation to the violence of geopolitics.

I am also developing a side project on how autistic people experience, perceive, and relate to the spatial dimensions of surveillance, policing, and counterterrorism.

I am open to supervising PhD students in my areas of interest. I would be particularly interested in supporting PhD students working on queer/neurodivergent/anti-colonial/feminist approaches to critical human geography.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Warwick
• MA, Sciences Po Paris
• BA, Monash University

Research groups and institutes

• Research and innovation