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
Matthew Abbey is lecturer in critical human geography at the University of Leeds. His research explores theories, forms, and practises of subjectivity, space, violence, and technology, using case studies drawn from the British and European colonial present. His research investigates the role of social hauntings, opacity, narrative silence, empirical absence, embodied gesture, queer performance, archiving, fantasy, the unconscious, desire, sexuality, neurodiversity, everydayness, temporality, and futurity in relation to the violence of bordering, policing, and counterterrorism, the technological risk society, and the 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 areas of research:
- First, he is developing a monograph that rethinks dominant understandings of surveillance and its harms, using psychoanalysis via queer theory to challenge the positivist value given to data within the political economy of surveillance.
- Second, he is writing a series of articles about the future of geopolitics in regard to various methods of anticipation, prediction, and speculation, using nonlinear approaches to time to query how the future impacts the present and vice versa.
- Third, he is developing a project on the growing effort to understand the brain within state security, using neurodiversity studies to interrogate what this means for pathologized forms of cognition, perception, and affect while also examining how neurodivergence makes the familiarity of violence appear strange in novel ways.
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