Matt York is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Collective Social Futures.  He is a transdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of critical political theory, the (deep) commons, climate justice, critical animal studies, revolution, contemporary social and ecological movements, the utopian imagination, posthumanism, and the politics of love. His work focuses on developing solutions to critical social and ecological challenges through the co-production of political and social theory and practice with third sector organisations and grassroots constituencies.

He has successfully initiated, developed, and evaluated a wide range of engaged, co-creative, and collaborative research projects with a diversity of marginalised communities — securing community and stakeholder buy-in, and delivering meaningful impacts.  These include research processes with mental health service users, the Irish Traveller community, Zulu communities in South Africa, social and ecological activists internationally, and his research on the People’s Transition facilitating participatory deliberative processes in communities across the island of Ireland.

Matt is currently working on GreenInCities— an EU-funded project under the ‘Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities’ and ‘Adaptation to Climate Change’ missions that aims to transform urban spaces through Nature-based Solutions.  Prior to this, he was Senior Researcher in Climate Justice at TASC—Ireland’s Think-tank for Action on Social Change, lectured in critical political theory at UCC, and worked for many years in the community and voluntary sector in Europe and Africa. He is the founder and current chair of Mandala Trust—an Irish-based organisation dedicated to supporting children and young people in vulnerable situations around the world.

A key theme of Matt's research explores love as a revolutionary political concept and praxis for social change.  The work has made an important contribution to theories of political, economic, and social transformation by employing participatory methods that have brought the voices of ecological, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-racist activists to the fore of critical political science research.  The research was awarded both the 2021 American Political Science Association Steven E Bronner Award and 2022 Irish Political Studies Association Basil Chubb Award, and was disseminated via his book Love and revolution: a politics for the deep commons in 2023.  As a result of this work he developed a ‘collective visioning’ methodology involving group processes of intentionally generating grounded visions that are long-term, expansive, and solutions driven.  This has enabled him to engage impactfully with a number of activist communities, including in South Africa, Mexico, Trouwunna (Tasmania, Austra­lia), Ireland, UK, Syria, Uganda, Germany, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey, USA and Jordan, with movement engagement including social and ecological activism, indigenous struggles, feminist activism, refugee solidarity work, food sovereignty projects, cooperatives and permaculture projects. 

From an ecological perspective, Matt’s research has been instrumental in advancing dialogue and scholarship on commons theory.  His concept of ‘deep commons’ has emerged as a new framework challenging conventional economic understandings of commons as mere resource pools, responding to a growing recognition of our planetary emergency and the profound limitations of frameworks that seperate nature from culture or treat commons as primarily human institutions.  He contends that commons exist within a deeper ontological reality of interdependence and co-creation that humans participate in but do not fully determine, and strives to articulate the entangled more-than-human relationships across multiple dimensions—material, affective, symbolic—that co-constitute what we call reality. 

Matt’s deep commons research thus recognises that the work of building alternatives involves not just changing economic structures but cultivating qualitatively different ecologies of relation. These ecologies must simultaneously challenge multiple systems of domination—capitalism, anthroparchy, patriarchy, racism, and the state—that enforce harmful boundaries and extractive relationships.  By attending to the affective dimensions of commoning—the embodied capacities for care, joy, and solidarity across difference—the work aims to support contemporary eco-social movements to co-create conditions where alternatives to dominant systems can take root and grow.  Originally funded by an Early Career Academic Award from the National University of Ireland, the research has met with a very positive response from both academic and activist communities, leading to an international conference, research network, and edited collection further developing the theory.  See: www.deepcommons.net