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Dr Matt Mahmoudi

Dr Matt Mahmoudi is an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities, and an Affiliated Lecturer in Sociology. 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. 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).

Research Interests

My research focuses on red-lining and resistance in digital cities, and the “smart”-urban reproduction of racial capitalism.
I'm currently interrogating the role of the symbiosis of technology giants and city authorities in superimposing neo-colonial relations of power in urban contexts. Here, historically marginalized and racialized populations play the role of the test population–what I have referred to as the digital periphery elsewhere–under the auspices of whom technology corporations can win major contracts with cities. Cities not only finance their interventions but legitimize their access to population data, which is in turn commodified and sold to law and immigration enforcement, and/or used for the iteration of further products.

I have a broader interest in the 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. In recent years, this has included analysing the techno-industrial entanglements underpinning contexts of extreme borderization, from the high-tech borders of EU and the US, to apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Research Projects

My forthcoming research project is titled 'WHOSE CITY? Red-lining & Resistance in Digital Cities'

Teaching

I am currently teaching the 'Control & Resistance in Digital Societies' module of SOC3, in addition to my MPhil and PhD teaching at Cambridge Digital Humanities. I am currently supervising a limited number of undergraduate sociology dissertations, as well as MPhils in Digital Humanities.

Publications

Books

Mahmoudi, M. 2025. Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control. University of California Press (Forthcoming)

Aizeki, M., Mahmoudi, M., Schupfer, C. (Eds.) 2024. Resisting Borders & Technologies of Violence. Chicago: Haymarket Publishing.

 

Book Chapters

Mahmoudi, M., (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.

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.

 

Articles

(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.

(Under peer review with Big Data & Society), Mahmoudi, M. ‘Silicon Chips in Search of Racial Capital’ in McInerney, K., Dutta, S., and Muzamdar (Eds.), Everyday Experiences of Data Colonialism and Data Nationalism, special issue, Big Data & Society.

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.

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.

Research Groups & Affiliations

Assistant Professor at Cambridge Digital Humanities (Primary)
Research Affiliate at Centre of Governance & Human Rights
Affiliate Researcher at the DALOSS project @ University of Copenhagen

Awards

2020 - Technology Enabled Learning Prize (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences category) for the Cambridge Digital Verification Corps (jointly founded and led with Dr Ella McPherson), University of Cambridge

2019 - Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact Award, University of Cambridge

2018 – Jo Cox PhD Scholarship in Refugee & Migration Studies

Job Title:
Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities & Affiliated Lecturer in Sociology
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