Sara Matthews is a Graduate Faculty member in the MA in Communication Studies, the MA in Cultural Analysis and Social Theory, and the PhD in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She accepts students in the areas of: cultural studies; critical security studies; platform studies (autonomous weapons, drones, artificial intelligence); museum studies; and visual culture and memory.

Sara’s research and teaching are interdisciplinary and consider the dynamics of conflict and social change. Working primarily in the field of research-creation, her projects explore the relations between visual culture and martial politics as well as how communities craft creative modes of relationality and survival in response to practices of state securitization. She has several ongoing research projects in the field of critical security studies.

Along with co-author Dr. Nathan Rambukkana, Sara is developing a manuscript titled Unfolding AI: Platforms, Affects, and Human–Machine Intimacies (forthcoming 2026). The book tackles the emergent topics of AI and robotics through the framework of Human-Machine Intimacies. Growing from a “digital intimacies” tradition that brings the insights of critical intimacy studies into conversation with digital culture studies, the monograph considers how human intimacies are produced, crystallized, and undone through engagements with artificial intelligence and its various platforms.

Sara has a second, collaborative book project in development with co-author Dr. Mary Kavanagh. Trinity Returns investigates the persistence of atomic time in two registers: as a durational aesthetic inquiry and as a commentary on atomic tourism and how meaning is made from the afterlife of the atom bomb. The manuscript brings visual archives and lens based images together with interviews and field notes investigating the material evidence of weapons testing, infrastructures of nuclear remediation, and public pedagogies that narrate atomic culture at two key sites of Cold War militarization: the Trinity atomic bomb test site and Project Y, the secret laboratory established by the University of California in Los Alamos to support the Manhattan Project.

Lastly, Sara has a long-term research collaboration exploring discourses of preparedness and public safety in the context of the history of emergency measures in Canada. Supported by her affiliation with the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada, she will be launching (Fall 2026) a digital exhibition that takes up the history of the Freeport MEGHQ located in Kitchener. Sara’s previous research in collaboration with the Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum (SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant 2019) aimed to preserve and analyze historic civil defence materials. Her research outputs include a digital exhibition examining Canadian Cold War propaganda posters which can be viewed here. A workshop (SSHRC Connections Grant 2022) exploring the spatialization of preparedness in Canada was also held, and can be read about here.

In addition to her academic work, she curates aesthetic projects that archive the ways in which visual encounters with conflict and loss and emerge as new forms of futurity, materiality and placemaking. Read more about her research-creation projects and art writing on her personal website.