My research asks how metaphysical infrastructure shapes the distribution of violence, relation, and perception in colonial and postcolonial geographies. I work across anthropology, cultural geography, political ontology, and environmental thought to examine how space – legal, spectral, affective – produces and sustains racialized and ecological forms of alienation. My projects blend theoretical and ethnographic methods and are animated by a commitment to dis-alienating knowledge from colonial form.
My dissertation investigates the dissociated afterlives of the plantation system in the Gulf South. Drawing from trauma theory, environmental humanities, and Black geographies, the project develops a method I call “nonrepresentational ethnography” as a way to read ecological and spatial formations that foregrounds not what is represented, but what remains unintegrated.
I argue that trauma can operate at the level of the social body not only through memory or transmission, but also through the foreclosure of relation itself. This work contributes to anthropology and cultural geography by offering a methodology attuned to the ambient, unassimilated, and unconscious.
In an earlier project I analyzed a 1999 Māori claim to the radio spectrum as a form of Indigenous territorial sovereignty, framing this event as an ontological confrontation between relational conceptions of atmospheric space and neoliberal property logics, arguing that the electromagnetic spectrum functions as a repressed metaphysical commons. In a related project, I authored a critical history of the ether and its transformation into spectrum under colonial governance, tracing how electromagnetic natures were reified into legal and economic instruments while remaining haunted by older metaphysical imaginaries. Another ongoing project offers a playful but serious provocation to approach climate change through the view of a Gnostic. In it, I explore how ecological collapse refracts deep alienation from the world and challenges assumptions of origin, nature, and salvation.
In all these projects, I develop a theory of “ontological capture” and push towards a means to think ecology beyond the garden.
I further bring these commitments into practice through Yes We Cannibal, a two-person collective founded with my wife, Liz Lessner in 2020. Over the course of five years in Baton Rouge, we operated as a brick and mortar non-transactional project space for new art and thought featuring curated exhibitions, public lectures, and interdisciplinary programs that foregrounded experimental, relational, and decolonial forms of knowledge. This work is inseparable from my scholarship, and continues to shape how I think across theory, embodiment, and collective practice. Yes We Cannibal is also our artistic authorial name for collaborative works of film, sculpture, and new media.
Across all of my work, I am interested in what happens when we take seriously the metaphysical premises of property, sovereignty, and environment and the possibility of orienting to them otherwise.
That’s my dog. Her name is Danger.
PhD Candidate, Geography and Anthropology
227 Howe-Russell-Kniffen Geoscience Complex, Louisiana State University
mkeel6@lsu.edu / mat.keel@gmail.com | 240-595-9421
Advisors: Helen Regis (chair), Chris Barrett (English), Sarah Franzen
Degrees
PhD, Anthropology Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge exp. early 2025
Doctoral Research, Geography University of Bristol, UK 2015-6
MA, Geography University of California, Los Angeles 2015
BA, Geography University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Awards and Fellowships
- Everett Award, Baton Rouge Arts Council 2024
- La Baldi Fellowship 2022
- Louisiana Project Grant 2022
- Monroe Fellowship 2022
- American Ethnological Society Small Grants 2021
- Graduate Assistantship, Ethics Institute, Louisiana State University 2019-2021
- Graduate Assistantship, Anthropology and Geography, Louisiana State University 2019-2021
- Alumni Award, University of Bristol 2015-2016
Peer-Reviewed Publications
- “Yes We Cannibal Panel Discussion: Reading, Unearthing and Eating Anthropocentrism with Cesar and LOIS” (with Liz Lessner) Anthropology of Consciousness, 2022
- “Listen Liberal, another world is actual: Whiteness and political ontology in the psychedelic renaissance” Anthropology of Consciousness, 2022
Book Reviews
- “Book Review: A World of Many Worlds by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser “AAG Review of Books 9(2) 2021
- “Book Review: The Political Sublime by Michael J Shapiro” AAG Review of Books (7)1 2019
Other Publications
- “We Were Never Alone” in Emptiness Ecologies, Yes We Cannibal 2025 Baton Rouge
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“How many ways to look at a tree?: Vegetal reflection and distance in Steven L. Anderson’s Entropy Plan for the Western Fam” Forthcoming
- “On Freak Space, the Risk of the Subject and the Deferral of Philip Guston” (with Liz Lessner as Yes We Cannibal) REFUSE: A Journal of Iconoclasms 1(1) 2021
- “Foraging Wild Mushrooms” (as Yes We Cannibal) Earthbound Almanac 2021
Select Work Experience
- Co-Founder and Co-Director Yes We Cannibal, Baton Rouge, LA 2020-2024
Prolific experimental space for new art and thought
https://yeswecannibal.org - Assistant to the Editor AAG Review of Books 2019-20
Selected Invited Lectures
- “Triggering the Plantation Unconscious / Against Psychedelic Liberalism” Cultivate Rockville, MD. 2021
- “Horizontal Responses to the Opioid Epidemic” La Terre Institute. New Orleans, LA. 2018
- “Life to Death, Flower to Needle, Afghanistan to West Virginia: Contemporary and Historical Geographies of the Opioid Epidemic” Shepherd University Shepherdstown, WV. 2018
Selected Conference Presentations
- “Hegel and Viveiros de Castro” RGS-IBG 2022, Presenter
- “More-than-Earth: Mutiny Ecologies.” World Ecology Research Network. Online, 2021. Organizer and Presenter.
- “Hard Time in the Garden of Eden: Agency and Original Sin in the Gnostic Anthropocene.” Consciousness Reframed. Porto, Portugal. 2018. Presenter.
- “The Post-Ferguson Police State.” Organizer, AAG. Chicago, IL 2015. Organizer.
Selected Workshops
- Decolonizing Knowledge / Power: Postcolonial Studies, Decolonial Horizons. Barcelona. 2016
- Decolonizing the Anthropocene. Kings College, London. 2015
Academic Work Experience
- Instructor of Record, LSU Anthropology and Geography 2020
- Teaching Assistant, LSU Anthropology and Geography 2019-2021
- Adjunct Instructor Shepherd University, Geography and Sociology 2018
- Teaching Assistant, Bristol University (UK) Geographical Sciences 2015-6