Profile

Dr Madeline-Sophie (Maddy) Abbas completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Leeds, funded by a University Research Scholarship. She is a critical race scholar and activist engaged in anti-racism, decolonisation and social justice.

Her research and teaching interests are in critical race and whiteness studies; Islamophobia; counter-terrorism, surveillance and security; epistemic violence and politics of (non)knowledge; citizenship, refugee, asylum, migration; and Palestine. She joined Lancaster in September 2022 as a Senior Lecturer in Racism and Anti-Racism in the Department of Sociology.

Previous posts include Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at Leeds Trinity University, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, Research Associate at Cambridge University for the Cambridge Migration Research Network, now the Centre for the Study of Human Movement, Lecturer in Sociology at Oxford Brookes University, and Teaching Assistant at the University of Leeds.

She is an editorial board member for the flagship European Sociological Association journal, European Societies, and Sociological Research Online, a British Sociological Association journal.

Her research has been widely recognised and presented in the UK and internationally, and she continues to engage with public, policy and academic discourse. She has frequently been asked to contribute to the media, public engagement and conferences.

Abbas has a long-standing love of all forms of art and culture and has been lucky enough to have been involved in truly thought-provoking art-based collaborations and dialogues which have brought energising and new ways of working and thinking. These include an immersive theatre production, Be/Longing (2018) with Take Back Theatre which transformed the theatre space to resemble a warehouse at the edge of the border through which audience members were subjected like asylum seekers to ‘processing’ and which used installations, music, art, video and scripted theatre to provocatively and unapologetically challenge anti-migrant discrimination. The production was shortlisted in the Best Use of Creativity category for the PR Moments Awards in the North 2018. Abbas was a panellist discussing themes of Islamophobia and extremism following the Trojan Horse play (2019) at the Lowry, Manchester. She was moderator for acclaimed Palestinian author, Raja Shehadeh, at a Lancaster Arts and LitFest event, Walking Palestine (2025) exploring the theme of Land and a discussant for the Van Huynh Company’s Exquisite Noise (2024) hosted by Lancaster Arts which explored innovative forms of dissent through music, lighting and movement. She welcomes opportunities for working collaboratively and creatively with others beyond academia/traditional ways of doing academic work to challenge us to find new ways of (re)imagining and engaging with our social world.