Mathew Coleman

Mathew Coleman

Assistant Professor

Department of Geography

Ohio State University

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

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 a Fellow at OSU's Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies and an AAG Political Geography Specialty Group board member.

RESEARCH

As a political geographer, with a longstanding interest in economic geography and 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 power and resistance to it.

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.

My current research and teaching interests are twofold. On the one hand, I am doing a lot of research on the politics of undocumented migration. Topics include:

* US immigration law reform politics and the figure of the undocumented alien

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

* How and why immigration policing blurs the line between foreign and public policy politics and spaces

* The spatial variability and unevenness of immigration law (i.e. municipal sanctuary laws and their relationship to federal immigration legislation)

* Local scale immigration enforcement

* The role of immigration policing in the neoliberalization of border landscapes, particularly in the US southwest

* Immigration enforcement at the Mexico-Guatemala border

* Operation Global Reach

* The changing shape of US-Mexico relations as regards immigration

In addition to my research on undocumented migration, I am interested in more theoretically minded questions about power and space, oriented toward the critical geopolitics and law and geography communities. Topics include:

* Law, “states of exception” and the war on terror

* Theories of geopolitics, critical geopolitics

* Genealogy

* Border studies

* Theories of empire and imperialism

* The spatiality of power in Michel Foucault’s work

* Contemporary theories of the biopolitical, as found in the work of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben, etc

* Work of Carl Schmitt

TEACHING

Introduction to Political Geography 460 (sample syllabus)

Political Geography Honors Seminar 460 (sample syllabus)

Global Politics and the Modern Geopolitical Imagination 465 will hopefully be on the books soon! (sample syllabus)