Matthew Abbey

Profile

Dr. Matthew Abbey is lecturer in critical human geography at the University of Leeds. His research explores theories, forms, and practices of space, violence, technology, and subjectivity, drawing on case studies about bordering, surveillance, policing, counterterrorism, and geopolitics.

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 also currently working on three strands of research. First, he is developing a monograph that rethinks dominant understandings of surveillance, 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.

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 open to supervising PhD students in the above areas of interest and related topics in critical human geography more broadly. He is also actively seeking PhD students working on critical approaches to artificial intelligence.

Research groups and institutes

• Research and innovation
• Social Justice, Cities, Citizenship