Mat Coleman

Associate Professor, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University

Contact info

 

1156 Derby Hall

154 N. Oval Mall

Department of Geography

The Ohio State University

Columbus OH 43210-1361

 

Phone: (614) 262 9686

Fax: (614) 292 6213

Email: coleman.373@osu.edu

 

Brief bio

I completed my BA in Political Science at the Department of Political Studies at l'Université d'Ottawa and my MA in Political Economy at the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. I finished my PhD in the Department of Geography at UCLA in 2005.

I am currently President of the Association of American Geographer's Political Geography Specialty Group.

Research

 

As a political geographer, with a longstanding interest in political economy, I am interested in how the contingencies and specificities of territory, place, and space shape what we can say about the exercise of state power.

 

My work examines the persistence of states in the world economy, as well as the ongoing importance of statecraft to world geopolitics. However, whereas much scholarship approaches statecraft as an abstract and relatively coherent act of territoriality (i.e. way of viewing and then organizing space), my interest lies with it as 1) a polyvalent bundle of sometimes countervailing projects with different institutional trajectories, 2) a multi-scalar practice which implicates any number of everyday spaces and practices, typically neglected in macro-scale analyses of the state and 3) a series of dispersed practices which play out unevenly across space and which produce places differently.

 

The bulk of my research concerns the politics of undocumented migration. Topics include, broadly:

 

-      US immigration law reform politics

-      The continuities and discontinuities of US immigration enforcement pre- and post- 9/11

-      Non-federal immigration legislation

-      Non-federal immigration enforcement

 

I am currently working with Angela Stuesse (Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida) on an NSF-sponsored project on non-federal immigration enforcement in the Atlanta GA metro area. The research examines the extent to which sheriffs and police are involved in immigration enforcement through programs like 287(g) and Secure Communities, and the effects of these practices.

 

I am also interested in more theoretically minded questions about power and space, oriented toward the critical geopolitics and law and geography literatures. Topics include:

 

-    law and geography

-    theories of geopolitics, critical geopolitics

-   genealogy

-    border studies

-    the spatiality of power in Michel Foucault’s work

-    biopolitics and biopower

-    the “everyday” of state power

Teaching

 

Geography 205: Introduction to Human Geography (sample syllabus coming soon)

 

Geography 460: Space, Power and Political Geography (sample syllabus coming soon)

 

Geography 465: World Politics and the Modern Geopolitical Imagination (sample syllabus coming soon)

 

Geography 600: Geographic Inquiry (sample syllabus coming soon)

 

Geography 795: Research Design (sample syllabus coming soon)

 

Geography 860: Theories of Political Geography (sample syllabus coming soon)