Matthew Porges

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow  

Affiliation: Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS)
Expert in: Borders and detention, Migration narratives, representations, and public opinion
Geographic focus: Sahara, North Africa, Balkans, Central Europe

Matthew's work explores how mobility is constructed, imagined, and utilised in the context of political aspiration. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, his research asks how mobile populations pursue political goals, how they conceptualise their struggles, and how they utilise mobility in support of their objectives. Since 2014, he has carried out fieldwork in North Africa (Mauritania, Western Sahara, Algeria, Morocco) alongside nomadic pastoralists, and is currently embarking on a new project on the politics of migrant activism in the former Yugoslavia, primarily Slovenia.