My research and teaching interests are in critical race and whiteness studies, Islamophobia, counter-terrorism, security and surveillance, and refugee, asylum and migration.  My research projects have explored the impact of counter-terrorism measures on British Muslims and institutional racism and race equality within higher education.  My current project looks at counter-terrorism policing, citizenship stripping and human rights.

I am interested in working with PhD candidates whose projects relate to my research interests of racism and anti-racism, race and ethnicity/critical race and whiteness studies, including work on: • Islamophobia • Counter-terrorism, security and surveillance • Refugee, asylum and migration • Institutional racism and race equality

Publications

She is the author of Terror and the Dynamism of Islamophobia in 21st Century Britain: The Concentrationary Gothic (2021), published with Palgrave for a major series, Politics of Identity and Citizenship.

The book advances an original framework - the Concentrationary Gothic - to explore the terrors of counter-terrorism in the 'war on terror' context affecting Muslims in Britain through racialised surveillance and policing strategies operating at state, group (inter- and intra-), and individual levels in diverse contexts such as the street, workplace, public transport and the home.  It situates these experiences within wider racial politics and theory, drawing connections to anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-Irishness and whiteness, to delineate how racial terror has operated in both historical and contemporary contexts of colonialism, slavery, and the camp, and offering a unique point of analysis through the use of Gothic tropes of haunting, monstrosity and abjection.

She has also published in the British Journal of Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnicities, International Journal of Inclusive Education (forthcoming) and The Routledge International Handbook of Criminology and Human Rights on political blackness, Islamophobia, the impact of counter-terrorism measures on Muslim communities and families, the convergence of counter-terrorism measures and asylum regimes within the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ and race equality and decolonisation within higher education.

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.  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.

Her recent Research England’s policy support funded project (2022) explored the impact of Prevent and related legislation on British Muslims’ experiences of citizenship and wider issues of citizenship deprivation and human rights in the context of counter-terrorism and security.

Racisms and Racial Formations SOCL243 - module lead (second year)

MA Dissertation SOCL949 - module lead (MA)

Contemporary Issues in Global Social Theory - guest lecturer (MA)

Gender and Women's Studies - guest lecturer (first year)