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2022-2025, Managing Editor of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
2022-present, Board Member of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies.
I received my PhD in Language, Culture and Teaching from York University in 2009 and my MA in Sociology and Equity Studies from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in 1998. My areas of study during my graduate training were critical anti-racism practices in higher education, and studies of learning from histories of racialized conflict. Collaborative work for my dissertation "A Pedagogy of Implication: Witnessing Historical Trauma as a Question of Learning" was conducted at the Centre For the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, South Africa.
My research and teaching are interdisciplinary and consider the dynamics of conflict and social change. Working primarily in the field of research-creation, my projects explore the relations between visual culture and martial politics as well as how communities craft creative modes of relationality and survival in response to practices of state securitization. I have several ongoing research projects in the field of critical security studies.
Along with my co-author Dr. Nathan Rambukkana, I am developing a manuscript titled Unfolding AI: Platforms, Affects, and Human–Machine Intimacies (forthcoming 2026). The book tackles the emergent topics of AI and robotics through the framework of Human-Machine Intimacies. Growing from a “digital intimacies” tradition that brings the insights of critical intimacy studies into conversation with digital culture studies, the monograph considers how human intimacies are produced, crystallized, and undone through engagements with artificial intelligence and its various platforms.
I have a second, collaborative book project in development with my co-author Dr. Mary Kavanagh. Trinity Returns investigates the persistence of atomic time in two registers: as a durational aesthetic inquiry and as a commentary on atomic tourism and how meaning is made from the afterlife of the atom bomb. The manuscript brings visual archives and lens based images together with interviews and field notes investigating the material evidence of weapons testing, infrastructures of nuclear remediation, and public pedagogies that narrate atomic culture at two key sites of Cold War militarization: the Trinity atomic bomb test site and Project Y, the secret laboratory established by the University of California in Los Alamos to support the Manhattan Project.
Lastly, I have a long-term research collaboration exploring discourses of preparedness and public safety in the context of the history of emergency measures in Canada. Supported by my affiliation with the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada, I will be launching (Fall 2026) a digital exhibition that takes up the history of the Freeport MEGHQ located in Kitchener. My previous research in collaboration with the Diefenbunker: Canada's Cold War Museum (SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant 2019) aimed to preserve and analyze historic civil defence materials. Our research outputs include a digital exhibition examining Canadian Cold War propaganda posters which you can view here. We also co-hosted a workshop (SSHRC Connections Grant 2022) exploring the spatialization of preparedness in Canada, which you can read about here.
In addition to my academic work, I curate aesthetic projects that archive the ways in which visual encounters with conflict and loss and emerge as new forms of futurity, materiality and placemaking. You can read more about my research-creation projects and art writing on my personal website.
- Faculty of Arts Teaching Scholar Award 2013
- Faculty Merit Award 2015, 2019, 2024.
External Funding
- 2022-2024. Principal Investigator, SSHRC Connection Grant, Mapping the Cold War: The Spatialization of Preparedness
- 2020-2022. Co-applicant, SSHRC Connections Grant, Working through security: methods of making security practices visible through research
- 2019-2022. Principal Investigator, SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant, Animating the archive: Cold war civil defence and public pedagogy
- 2016-2020. Co-applicant, SSHRC Insight Development Research-Creation Grant, Surveillant subjectivities: Digital youth cultures, art and affect
Internal Funding
- 2024-2025. Balsillie School of International Affairs Publication Grant
- 2024-2025. SSHRC Explore Grant, Atomic Archives and Oppenheimer Affects
I am Graduate Faculty in the MA in Communication Studies, the MA in Cultural Analysis and Social Theory, and the PhD in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. I accept students in the areas of: cultural studies; critical security studies; platform studies (autonomous weapons, drones, artificial intelligence); museum studies; and visual culture and memory.
Selected Writing
- 2025. Garrett, H. J. and S. Matthews. Prepper Pedagogies, Specters of Doomsday and Social Studies Education. In: Varga, B.A. (Ed.) Hauntological Social Studies: More-Than-Human Deviances, Imbrications, and Proliferations of Possibility. Springer Publishing
- 2024. Rambukkana, N. and S. Matthews. Platform Intimacies: Reckoning with the Digital as Intimate Relation. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies Vol 48, March 2024. p. 1-9.
- 2023. Matthews, S. Visualizing Drone Ethnography in the Shadows of Distributive War. In Cree, A. (Ed). Creative Methods in Military Studies. London: Rowman and Littlefield. p. 25-40.
- 2022. Abu Hatoum, N., S. Matthews, B. Story and A. Visan. Visualizing Security Studies Research. Surveillance and Society Vol 20(1):115-124.
- 2021. D. Georgis and S. Matthews. The Trouble With Research Creation: Failure, Play and Possibility in Aesthetic Encounters. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
- 2020. The Emergence of Emergency. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies Vol 4: 61-69.
- 2020. Poetics at the Perimeter of Vison. They are lost as soon as they are made, Karen Zalamea. Vancouver, BC: 175-181.
- 2019. Watching the Watchers. Philip Cheung: Arctic Front. Circuit Gallery/Prefix ICA, January 10 – February 2, 2019.
- 2018. Matthews, S., I. I. Diaz and M. Faraj. Prepper Pedagogy: Civil Defense, Emergency Preparedness and Nation Building. October 18, 2018. Antipode Foundation.
Creative Outputs
- 2019. Co-Curator. Variations on Black, Queer and Otherwise: Works by Abdi Osman. June 5-July 27, The Art Museum, University of Toronto.
- 2019. Curator. How to notice what cannot be seen/að sjá það sem hulið er. September 14-28, Herhúsid and The Herring Museum, Siglufjörður, Iceland.
- 2019. Solo exhibition. “The Cultural Life of Drones: KW Drone Dialogues”. Grebel Gallery for Peace Advancement, Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, Canada. November 14, 2019 – April 17, 2020.
Teaching, Winter 2025 Department of Communication Studies
CS400I: Testimony and Witnessing
CS240D: Doing Cultural Studies