Dr Matthew Mahmoudi, CDH
mm2134@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
Dr Matt Mahmoudi is an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities, with a research focus on red-lining and resistance in digital cities, and the “smart”-urban reproduction of racial capitalism. Matt comes from a scholar-practitioner background, consisting among other things of leading Amnesty International’s research and advocacy work on AI-driven surveillance from the NYPD’s surveillance machine to Automated Apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory, and teaching ‘Control & Resistance in Digital Societies’ as an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Sociology. Matt is also a Research Associate with the Centre of Governance and Human Rights.
He was awarded the inaugural Jo Cox PhD Studentship at the University of Cambridge, where he spent his doctoral research investigating smart cities as new frontiers for migrant violence and digital border control, drawing on the Black radical tradition, critical migration studies, and urban studies. Matt is a co-editor on Resisting Borders & Technologies of Violence (Haymarket, 2024) together with Mizue Aizeki and Coline Schupfer, and further appears in International Political Sociology, and Digital Witness (Oxford University Press, 2020). His forthcoming book is titled Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control (University of California Press, February 2025).
Areas of Graduate Supervision
Matt is especially interested in supervising projects related to the broader field of critical race and digital studies, including: critical race theory, urban studies, science and technology studies, and migration studies, in particular where these grapple with critical questions related to AI, surveillance, and racialization.
Selected Publications
(Under peer review with Security Dialogue). Mahmoudi, M. and Denyer Willis, G. From Passport to Proactive Profiling: Identity, Selective Governance and the Speculative Making of Bodies as Borders.
Mahmoudi, M., February 2025 (forthcoming). Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control. University of California Press
Aizeki, M., Mahmoudi, M., Schupfer, C. (Eds.) 2024. Resisting Borders & Technologies of Violence. Chicago: Haymarket Publishing.
Mahmoudi, M., 2024 (forthcoming), ‘Made in Palestine: Re-packaging Apartheid as “Smart” Cities,’ Chapter in Hassan, Z., and Hellyer, H.A., Palestine/Israel & Shrinking Civil Space—A Case Study. One World Academic, Random House.
Axster, S. Danewid, I., Goldstein, A., Mahmoudi, M., Tansel, C.B., Wilcox, L., (2021) ‘Colonial Lives of the Carceral Archipelago: Rethinking the Neoliberal Security State’, International Political Sociology, Volume 15, Issue 3, September, Pages 415–439.
McPherson, E., Thornton, I., Mahmoudi, M., (2019) ’Open Source Investigations and the Technology-Driven Knowledge Controversy in Human Rights Fact-Finding’, Chapter in Dubberley, S., Koenig, A., Murray, D., (Eds). (2020) Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation Documentation. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Blackwell, A., Church, L., Mahmoudi, M., et al., (2018) ‘Computer Says ‘don’t know’ - Interacting Visually with Incomplete AI Models’, DTSHPS workshop paper, arxiv.org.
