I am an Assistant Professor in Human Geography. Prior to this position I held a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowship at ϲ (2019-2022), and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018-2019) and Political Geography Teaching Fellowship (2017-2018) in the Geography Department at Durham University.
I am a Political Geographer, working on asylum politics, resistance, citizenship and the politics of epistemology within the academy. My work to date has coalesced around three main themes:
1. Geographies of resistance.
I am interested in how resistance is conceptualized within Geography. My work has explored how understandings of resistance within Geography are often characterised by a predetermination of form that particular actions or actors must assume to constitute resistance. Asking what we risk ignoring if we only focus on predetermined, recognisable resistant forms, my work seeks to revisit some of the fundamental assumptions (of intention, linearity and opposition) that underpin accounts of resistance. What are the logics that have come to govern how resistance is framed? What are the implications of decentering these logics for how Geographers engage with resistance? How/can Geographers engage with resistance in ‘its’ emergence?
2. Geographies of forced migration.
I have a longstanding interest in how systems of asylum governance are lived, experienced and resisted. To this end, I work with third sector organisations in the UK who, in different ways, support forced migrants in detention centres, dispersal accommodation and those who recently have been granted leave to remain.
I have recently finished a British Academy Small Grant (2021-2023): Bridging The Gap: The Lived Experiences of Refugees Granted Leave to Remain.You can read about this work in or in , or
3. Geographies of knowledge production.
My focus upon the geographies of knowledge production, has included pursuing questions around resistance, knowledge production and what constitutes ‘the political.' This has involved interdisciplinary work on Obfuscated democracy focussing upon the relationship between whistle-blowers, FOIA and knowledge production within the academy. I have also explored Affect and the politics of memory, and took part in collective research on affect and the politics of memory at the ten-year anniversary of the London bombings.
I have worked on Countermapping Detention, a collaborative project responding to the US government’s decicion to reschedule archival records from detention centres. As part of this work, we submitted written evidence to National Archive and Records Administration (NARA), concerning the pending decision to stop archiving this data.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
Mason, O. andHughes, S M.,(2024)A Cultural Geopolitics of Hosting: Domesticity, Violence and Hospitality in the Home,Geopolitics, Online First:
Griffiths, M., Hughes, S M., Mason, O., Nassar, A. and Currie, N.P. (2024), An open letter to the SJTGand the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG): The War on Gaza, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and a Palestinian literary event. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 45: 6-17.
Hughes, S. M., Murrey, A., Krishnan, S., van Teijlingen. K., Daley, P., Nowicki, M., Fannin, M., MacLeavy, J. (2022) Political Geography. Online First.
Hughes, S M. and Martin, L L. (2022)The Professional Geographer. 74(3): 415-429.
Hughes, S M. (2022) Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. 40(2): 541-560
Hughes, S M. (2021) Response to Gopal, Priyamvada. Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent.Dialogues in Human Geography. 11(3):497-499.
Hughes, S M.(2021) Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. 39(8):1725-1736.
Hughes, S M. (2020) Progress in Human Geography. 44 (6):1141-1160.
Garnett, P and Hughes, S. M. (2019)Political Geography. 68: 23-33
Maestri, G and Hughes, S. M. (2017) Citizenship Studies 21 (6): 625-639
Hughes, S. M. and Forman, P. (2017) Citizenship Studies 21 (6): 675-692
Closs Stephens, A, Hughes, S. M., Schofield, V. & Sumartojo, S. (2017) Emotion, Space and Society. 23:44-51.
Hughes, S. M. (2016) Citizenship Studies. 20:427-443.
Edited Books
Hughes, SM. (2023) Critical Geographies of Resistance.Edward Elgar Publishing: Cheltenham.
Book Chapters
Fisher, DX. andHughes, SM.(2023).The material politics of asylum support: Speed, intimacy, and confusion. In Le Louvier, K & Hough, KL (eds) UK Borderscapes: Sites of Enforcement and Resistance. Routledge: London.
Hughes, S M. and Garnett P. (2020) Researching the emergent technologies of state control: The court-martial of Chelsea Manning. In de Goede, M., Palister-Wilkins, P and Bosma, E (eds) Routledge Method’s textbook: Secrecy and Methodology in Critical Security Research. Routledge: London.
Garnett, P andHughes, S M.(2020) Obfuscated democracy? Chelsea Manning and the politics of democratic knowledge curation. In Macnish, K and Galliott, J’s (eds)Big Data and the Democratic Process. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh.
Hughes, S, M. (2019) Resistance. In Kobayashi, Aand Tyner, J (eds)International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography.Elsevier. London.
Book Reviews
Hughes, S. M. (2020) edited by Katharyne Mitchell, Reece Jones, and Jennifer L. Fluri. Border Criminologies.
Hughes, S. M. (2019) Book Review Journal of Refugee Studies. 32 (1): 169–171.
Hughes, S. M. (2018) “” edited by Michael J. Flynn and Matthew B. Flynn. (Edward Elgar, 2017). Border Criminologies.
Hughes, S. M. (2017) “.” Edited by Rich Furman, Douglas Epps and Greg Lamphear, (Oxford University Press, 2016) Carceral Geography Working Group of the RGS with IBG.
Hughes, S. M. (2016) “” by Nick Gill (John Wiley & Sons, 2016). Border Criminologies.
Public Commentaries
Hughes, S M. (2024) . Research Report.
Hughes, S M. (2023)‘The Conversation.
Hughes, S M.(2023). The New European.
Hughes, S M.(2021) [UCU Podcast]
Hughes, S. M and Garnett, P. (2018) . Society and Space [Online].
Hughes, S. M (2016) Border Criminologies.
Hughes, S. M (2016) “. Music in Detention.
Hughes, S. M (2016) .Border Criminologies.
Teaching
This academic year (2023-2024), I am teaching on the following modules:
Grants
I am currently treasurer of the of the Royal Geographical Society (2021-2023)
Anish Chhibber A critical genealogy of radical Black, Asian and antiracist resistance: spatial politics, collective care and emotion in and through late-twentieth-century London. Start Date: 18/01/2021
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