Jamie Matthews

Staff details

Position Lecturer
Department Sociology
Email j.matthews (@gold.ac.uk)

Jamie is a political, environmental and cultural sociologist, researching social movements and the role of civil society in climate, environmental and social justice policy.

His current projects address the politics of water, with work on the role of water in social theory, Welsh dam resistance, and memories of drowned places, and now mobilisations in defence of water bodies in Ireland, the UK, Spain and Mexico.

Jamie’s research has addressed: populism; collective speech; UK anti-austerity movements; Occupy; and ecological struggles. He has an interest in Latin American politics and ecologies. Jamie’s work uses engaged methods, and a broad critical theoretical literature, from post-structuralism, Marxism and political ecology.

Jamie is also interested in the politics of production and consumption in branded culture, convening MA in Brands, Communication and Culture. He is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy.

Research interests

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 : 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 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.

Publications and research outputs

Article

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

Matthews, Jamie. 2018. Occupation as refrain: territory and beyond in Occupy London. Social Movement Studies, 17(2), pp. 127-143. ISSN 1474-2837

Further profile content