Mathew Coleman

Mathew Coleman

Assistant Professor

Department of Geography

Ohio State University

1156 Derby Hall,

154 N. Oval Mall,

Department of Geography,

Ohio State University,

Columbus OH 43210-1361

Phone: (614) 262 9686

Fax: (614) 292 6213

Email: coleman.373@osu.edu

I completed my BA in Political Science at the Department of Political Studies at l'Université d'Ottawa and my MA in Political Economy at the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. I finished my PhD in the Department of Geography at UCLA in 2005.

I am currently a Fellow at OSU's Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies and Secretary-Treasurer for the Association of American Geographer's Political Geography Specialty Group.

I have research and teaching interests in political and economic geography, with a special emphasis on critical geopolitics and the politics of security. My current research explores local-federal immigration policing partnerships in the US in light of the way in which immigration policing has been made central to the war on terror. I am also interested in municipal sanctuary laws in the US and their contradictory relationship to federal immigration legislation. I teach graduate seminars as well as undergraduate courses on political geography, political theory, law and geography and geopolitics.

As a political geographer, with a longstanding interest in economic geography and political economy, I am interested in how the contingencies and specificities of territory, place and space shape what we can say about the exercise of state power.

My work examines the persistence of states in the world economy, as well as the ongoing importance of statecraft to world geopolitics. However, whereas much scholarship approaches statecraft as an abstract and relatively coherent act of territoriality (i.e. way of viewing and then organizing space), my interest lies with it as 1) a polyvalent bundle of sometimes countervailing projects with different institutional trajectories, 2) a multi-scalar practice which implicates any number of everyday spaces and practices, typically neglected in macro-scale analyses of the state and 3) a series of dispersed practices which play out unevenly across space and which produce places differently.

My current research and teaching interests are twofold. On the one hand, I am doing a lot of research on the politics of undocumented migration. Topics include:

¾      US immigration law reform politics

¾      The continuities and discontinuities of US immigration enforcement pre- and post- 9/11

¾      How and why immigration policing blurs the line between foreign and public policy politics and spaces

¾      The spatial variability and unevenness of immigration law (i.e. municipal sanctuary laws and their relationship to federal immigration legislation)

¾      Deportation and removal since the Chinese Exclusion Acts

¾      Local scale immigration enforcement

¾      Operation Global Reach

¾      US-Mexico and US-Canada relations regarding immigration enforcement

In addition to my research on undocumented migration, I am interested in more theoretically minded questions about power and space, oriented toward the critical geopolitics and law and geography literatures. Topics include:

¾    Law, “states of exception” and the war on terror

¾    Theories of geopolitics, critical geopolitics

¾    Genealogy

¾    Border studies

¾    Theories of empire

¾    The spatiality of power in Michel Foucault’s work

¾    Contemporary theories of the biopolitical, as found in the work of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben, etc

¾    Carl Schmitt and “legal” geopolitics

¾    Henri Lefebvre and the “everyday” of state power

Graduate students: blurbs coming soon!

Undergraduate students: blurbs coming soon!

Space, Power and Political Geography 460 (sample syllabus)

Political geography is the study of power and space; that is, the study of how relationships of power are at once spatial relationships, and how spaces are the product of relationships of power. This course introduces students to the complex interaction of space and power by surveying a suite of issues relating to the changing role of the state in matters of cultural, economic and political governance in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Throughout, an emphasis is placed on the geographical politics of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. Topics covered include (in no particular order): regulating capitalism and its global crises; the politics of gentrification in New York in the 1980s; the switch from Fordism to post-Fordism in the American economy (i.e. deindustrialization and the growth of the tertiary sector); the globalization of production, and its regulation; the globalization of finance (i.e. foreign direct investment and portfolio investment), and its regulation; debt and the housing crisis in contemporary America; the Mexican and Asian financial crises; the politics and policing of undocumented migration in the western hemisphere; the postmodern and postcolonial turns in geographic thought; the Treasury Bill economy; the post-Cold War militarization of international borders in the US and EU; the role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund vis-à-vis the neoliberalization of developing country economies; the shifting contours of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War; US geopolitical strategy in the Middle East in the post-9/11 context; maquiladora production, and the feminization of labor; policing in Los Angeles and the politics of race; the politics of nationalism, with a focus on Quebec; China’s growing economic role in the world economy; the phenomenon of global retailing (i.e. the spread of box stores); the ongoing relevance of the 1973 oil crisis and the collapse of Bretton Woods; developing country debt crises; and, new and old forms of imperialism.

We will also review a number of approaches to political geography, including regions and regionalism, spatial science, political economy, localities studies, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and feminism.

The goal of the course is to introduce students to the deeply complex geographies of cultural, economic and political power which weave peoples and places across the globe into a dense “power geometry”. By the end of the course, students are theoretically and empirically conversant in the myriad ways in which life ‘inside’ the US is profoundly dependent on multiple forms of life on the ‘outside’.

Space, Power and Political Geography Honors Seminar 460 (sample syllabus)

Global Politics and the Modern Geopolitical Imagination 465 (sample syllabus)

International Relations (IR) is commonly understood as the disciplinary home for research on war and conflict. This was not always the case. In the first half of the 20^th century, geographers were at the forefront of peace and conflict studies, albeit under the banner of “geopolitics” rather than “foreign policy studies”. This changed dramatically after WWII, as a result of geographers’ attempts to distance themselves from Nazi geopolitik. Although a small group of scholars maintained an interest in geopolitics during the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that the discipline returned publicly to geopolitical research and teaching.

In an effort to explore this generally neglected, rich and highly contested tradition of geopolitical research, this course will survey key geopolitical thinkers and theories in Geography over the past 150 years. Several themes will be emphasized, including: a) geopolitics as the strategic visualization of global space, which we will refer to as “the modern geopolitical imagination”; b) the gradual displacement of the state as the basic unit of geopolitical analysis; c) the political, economic and social context of the geopolitics theory industry; d) the general transformation of geopolitics from a handmaiden of the state to a more critical form; and e) similarities and differences between geographical research on geopolitics and past and current research in IR.

Theories of Political Geography Graduate Seminar 860 (sample syllabus 1, sample syllabus 2, sample syllabus 3)

**Graduate seminar on Henri Lefebvre coming Spring 2010**

Coleman, M. (2009) What Counts as Geopolitics, and Where? Devolution and the Securitization of Immigration After 9/11. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (December).

w/ Grove, K. (2009) Biopolitics, Biopower and the Return of Sovereignty. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(3), pp. 489-507.

Coleman, M. (2009). Sovereignty. In R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (London: Elsevier).

Coleman, M. (2008). Deserting Sovereignty? The Securitization of Undocumented Migration in the US. In F. Debrix and M. Lacy Geopolitics of American Insecurity: Terror, Power and Foreign Policy (London: Routledge), pp. 107-125.

Coleman, M. (2008). US Immigration Law and its Geographies of Social Control: Lessons from Homosexual Exclusion during the Cold War. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(6), pp. 1096-1114.

w/ Thomas, M. (2008). The Power and Performativity of Bush’s Mug. Antipode 41(1), pp. 15-21.

Coleman, M. (2008). Immigratio=Criminale: L’Equazione Che Non Funziona. Limes – Rivista Italiana di Geopolitica 6, pp. 169-178.

Coleman, M. (2008). Between Public and Foreign Policy: US Immigration Law Reform and the Undocumented Migrant. Urban Geography 29(1), pp. 4-28.

Coleman, M. (2008). Power and Space in the Colonial Present. Political Geography 27(3), pp. 354-359.

w/ Agnew, J. A. (2007). The Problem with Empire. In J. Crampton & S. Elden (eds.) Space, Knowledge and Power – Foucault and Geography (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate), pp.317-340.

Coleman, M. (2007). Review Essay (3 000 words). Agamben G State of Exception (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(1), pp. 187-190.

Coleman, M. (2007). A Geopolitics of Engagement: Neoliberalism and the War on Terrorism at the Mexico-US Border. Geopolitics 12 (4), pp. 607-634.

Coleman, M. (2007). Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico-US Border. Antipode 38(1), pp. 54-76.

Coleman, M. (2005). Permeable Borders and Boundaries in a Globalizing World: Feeling at Home Amidst Global Poverty. In H. N. Nicol & I. Townsend-Gault (eds.) Holding the Line – Borders in a Global World (Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press), pp. 293-207.

Coleman, M. (2005). US Statecraft and the US-Mexico Border as Security/ Economy Nexus. Political Geography 24(2), pp. 185-209.

Coleman, M. (2004). Geopolitics as a Social Movement: The Causal Primacy of Ideas? Geopolitics 9(2), pp. 484-491.

Coleman, M. (2003). The Naming of Terrorism and Evil Outlaws: Geopolitical Place-Making After 11 September. Geopolitics 8(2), pp. 87-104.

Coleman, M. (2002). Thinking About the World Bank’s ‘Accordion’ Geography of Financial Globalization. Political Geography 21(4), pp. 495-524.