Jamie Matthews

Jamie’s research interests centre on contemporary movements, particularly in the Global North, organising around issues of economic justice, climate crisis and the resurgent nationalist right. He has published work on themes including : populism; occupation and the spatiality of protest; the role of collective speech in political organisation; and literary readings of social movement theory. Empirically, Jamie’s work has addressed movements such as: Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London; the UK anti-fracking movement and global ‘Blockadia’; the UK anti-austerity movement; anarchist antifascism; ‘water protector’ movements; and Welsh nationalism. This also draws on a wider research interest in histories of anarchist organising, indigenous struggle and slave resistance.

Jamie is interested in the applications of Deleuze-Guattarian concepts to social movement analysis, and to debates on political organisation across the Marxist, post-Marxist and anarchist traditions. His current work also draws on political ecology, feminist new materialism and ecocriticism, part of a wider interest in the intersections of sociology, poetry and literary fiction.

He is interested in the problem of producing engaged but critical research on political movements, including debates surrounding autoethnography and ‘militant’ ethnography.