Sara Matthews is a writer, educator and researcher based in southern Ontario. Her research and teaching are interdisciplinary and consider the dynamics of conflict and social change. Working primarily in the field of research-creation, her 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.
Her areas of research include the following: critical security studies + surveillance + drone technologies + discourses of public safety and civil defense + war museums and public history education + war, memory and visual culture + dystopias/utopias and social futurities. She is a curriculum theorist by training and draws on approaches from cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory in her work.
Sara is Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She supervises students in the MA program in Communication Studies and the PhD in Global Governance. You can read more about her academic work here.
In addition to her academic-based work, Sara curates aesthetic projects that archive the ways in which encounters with conflict and loss emerge as new forms of futurity, materiality and placemaking. Her critical art writing has appeared in PUBLIC, FUSE Magazine and in exhibition essays for the Robert Langen Gallery, Circuit Gallery, the Ottawa Art Gallery, the Doris McCarthy Gallery and as a blog for Gallery TPW.