Dr Matt Wilde

Matt is an interdisciplinary social scientist who specialises in ethnographic research on energy and natural resources, urban politics, morality and the state. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2013 and previously held research and teaching positions with the University of London, the University of Sussex and the LSE.

Matt's regional interests cover Latin America, the UK and the USA. His work has been funded by the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and in the Independent Social Research Fund (ISRF).

Matt's research explores how political economies of energy shape people's everyday lives in urban settings. He is particularly interested in the challenges that progressive urban social movements face in contexts of resource crisis, and in the diverse democratic experiments, moral subjectivities and life trajectories that are produced through efforts to overcome entrenched injustices.

Matt's first monograph examined the lived experience of political change, moral uncertainty and economic crisis amid Venezuela's controversial Bolivarian Revolution. Titled A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela (2023, Stanford University Press), the book draws on ethnographic research conducted in an urban barrio over the course of a decade (2008-2018) to explore how Venezuela's contradictory relationship with petroleum shaped myriad aspects of urban life during a period of complex social upheaval. As well as offering an accessible way of understanding the many paradoxes of Bolivarian Venezuela, the book also provides an original take on current debates about democracy, energy transitions and revolutionary change.

Matt's current research has two core themes. The first traces the experiences of Venezuelan migrants who have left the country amid a decade-long multidimensional crisis. After beginning this work in Colombia, he is now focusing on those who have made their way to the United States. This emerging research uses the Venezuelan migrant experience to explore wider questions about the (geo)politics of sanctuary cities. Alongside this continuing interest in Venezuela and its diaspora, Matt is also exploring the political and moral dimensions of energy transitions through a multi-sited study of the global wind industry.

Matt has also carried out ethnographic research on the politics of housing in London as part of a collaborative Europe-wide project looking at advice, austerity governance and community activism. He retains a broad political and theoretical interest in the emancipatory potential of cities and urban life.

Matt's work has appeared in a range of scholarly publications including Anthropology Today, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Critique of Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, Latin American Perspectives and the Radical Housing Journal. He has also written op-ed pieces for Counterpunch, Public Books, The Conversation and The Guardian.

Matt is interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

• Activism and urban politics
• Democracy and populism
• Critical urban studies
• Ethnographic approaches to the state
• Latin America, the UK and the USA
• The politics of energy transition

Current PhD students: 

• Giorgia Mascaro: Historic Preservation, Gentrification and Heritagisation in China: a comparison of Langzhong against the classic case of Lijiang

• Stefano Pagin Paredes de Abreu: Gentrification and the production of poverty in São Paulo, Brazil

• Harry Rodgers: Creative labour of The Venezuelan diaspora: entrepreneurship, imagination and precarity in Spain

• Tom York: Winds of change: analysing the social and environmental geographies of wind energy

Matt teaches on the following modules:

GY1422: Introduction to Leicester Geographies

GY2412: Economy, Society and Space

GY2415: Overseas Field Course

GY2416: Space, Territory and Power

GY3412: Cities of the Global South

GY7411: Contemporary Critical Geographies

GY7412: Creative Geographies in Practice

Matt is available for comment in the following areas:

• The social and political life of Venezuela
• Urban politics in Latin America, the UK and the USA
• The politics of energy transition