Profile
Jamie joined Queen Mary in 2024, having previously worked at Goldsmiths University of London, where he was a lecturer in the department of Sociology, and co-director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. He also taught at the University of Manchester, where he gained his PhD in Sociology in 2017.
Jamie’s research currently explores the relationship between water and social movements, with two principal areas of focus: first, how activist communities develop and circulate alternative water knowledges in a climate changing world; and second how a politics found amidst the meanings and materialities of water presents emancipatory possibilities in the web of life. He has published work on historical reservoir/dam resistance and water’s prominence in the theories and language used to describe political change.
His previous research has focused on economic justice, urban protest and anti-austerity movements in the UK, with publications on populism and representation, and the spatial politics of urban protest camps. Jamie’s research draws on ethnographic methodologies, and his critical ethnography of the UK’s Occupy movement was a winner in the Jeffrey Juris Prize for engaged social movement ethnography, awarded by the journal Social Movement Studies.
Teaching
Semester A:
POL280 Social Theory (Module Convenor, Lecturer, Seminars)
POL304 Environmental Politics (Module Convenor, Lecturer, Seminars)
Semester B:
POL180 Global Sociology (Seminar Tutor)
Research
Research Interests:
Jamie’s research interests centre on contemporary movements organising around issues of economic justice, climate crisis and waterways. He has published work on themes including: water politics; dam resistance; populism; occupation and the spatiality of protest; the role of collective speech in political organisation; and literary readings of social movement theory.
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 politics, sociology, and creative literature.
He is interested in the problem of producing engaged but critical research on political movements, including debates surrounding autoethnography and ‘militant’ methods.
Publications
Matthews, Jamie. 2023. Waves, Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 55(6), pp. 1822-1840. ISSN 0066-4812
Matthews, Jamie. 2019. Populism from below? Occupy, ‘the 99%’ and the problem with representation. The Sociological Review Magazine, ISSN 2754-1371
Matthews, Jamie. 2019. Populism, inequality and representation: Negotiating ‘the 99%’ with Occupy London. The Sociological Review, 67(5), pp. 1018-1033. ISSN 0038-0261
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Matthews, Jamie. 2018. Occupation as refrain: territory and beyond in Occupy London. Social Movement Studies, 17(2), pp. 127-143. ISSN 1474-2837
Supervision
I am interested in supervising PhDs in the following:
- Social movements, uprisings and protest
- Environmental politics and activism
- Water politics (right to water, rights of rivers etc)
- Urban commons
Politics of consumer culture
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