Dr Matt Hargrave

Assistant Professor

School: Design Arts and Creative Industries

Matt joined the Department in 2004 after having worked as a writer, theatre maker and community arts practitioner with many leading cultural providers including: Northern Stage, New Writing North, Mind the Gap, Live Theatre, and Arts Council England. Matt’s teaching ranges across Theatre and Performance, Film and Media and Creative and Cultural Industries Management. His research interests and PhD supervision specialisms include culture and disability; arts and mental health; and social class in the creative industries.

I studied Politics and Modern History at Manchester University, which was great, but less fun than making things up; so I enrolled on an MA in Contemporary Performing Arts at Bretton Hall College. Here I discovered that performance was an inexhaustible subject, and it could involve anyone, regardless of age, background or training: it could be vehemently political, or frivolous, or both, simultaneously. I developed a strong interest in the social application of the arts, particularly through the work of Augusto Boal and the UK based company, Mind the Gap; and I continued to work as a community arts practitioner until taking up the full-time post at Northumbria.

In 2006 I began a doctoral study of theatre involving learning disabled artists, funded by the AHRC. The companies I collaborated with were frustrated by the lack of critical engagement in their work: analysis that did exist tended to stress the social, or even curative, benefits of theatre. My research tried to fill this gap, to think about intellectual impairment as a set of performance qualities and as an innovation in theatre. I considered the work of learning-disabled artists in the same way that more mainstream theatre practice is evaluated: as a craft and an artform. Theatres of Learning Disability, the book that resulted from this research, won the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s 2016 Early Career Research Award.

I have maintained a strong research interest in marginalised cultural practices, relating to issues of social exclusion and blocked social mobility. I have published articles about Stand-up comedy, particularly its relationship to mental health and neurodiversity. I have explored how comedians talk about mental illness and how comedy has the potential to disrupt normative assumptions about wellbeing. This is important because one of the hidden strengths of the creative industries is their capacity to disrupt cultural norms, especially those which lead to harmful social stigmas.

More recently I have begun work on a new monograph, Deindustrialisation in Visual Cultures of Northern Britain. Brexit and Trumpism have sharpened interest in the effects of deindustrialisation on the UK and I am exploring how art and culture respond to this (often strange and unsettling) ongoing process. One affective reflex is melancholia, a complex set of psychic mechanisms that leaves individuals (and communities) in a state of suspended grief, unable to let go of the loss. By probing film, media, visual practices and performance, I explore how melancholia becomes a new critical tool for the creative and cultural industries, which can be deployed to understand representations of class, gentrification, social (im)mobility and regional decline; and also inform debates about right-wing populism. This project is strongly connected to the work of the DACI research group, Class Studies: Performing and Visualising Class in the Creative Industries, which I co-lead with Dr Martyn Hudson. The research group identifies Social class as a core challenge facing the creative industries and seeks to build on The Sutton Trust’s Class Act Report (2024) which evidenced the huge decrease in social mobility in the creative industries over the last 40 years. We aim to nurture working class researchers - and their allies - in the post-graduate and wider student body. In an era where has austerity shaped, and will continue to shape, artistic practice across the creative industries, we are engaging our students and cultural partners in dialogues that will imagine and propagate more equitable futures.

Campus Address

Lipman 007
Northumbria University
Newcastle upon Tyne

Email Matt

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

My research is interdisciplinary and concerned to understand how artists and cultural practitioners currently under represented in the cultural industries can challenge perceptions of what is possible or ‘good’ and in doing so recalibrate the underlying politics of representation. I am interested in the fact (obvious but often forgotten) that human variation in many forms - disability, neurodivergence, non-normative mental states, psycho-social class dynamics - is an aesthetic and social resource to be explored and celebrated, not least because it reveals the underlying inequalities and politics of ‘the normal’.

I have sought to generate new knowledge about under-theorised cultural practices, evidenced by my monograph, Theatres of Learning Disability, which won the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s Early Career Research Award in 2016. The awarding panel stated that the book ‘challenges us to think and see differently…offering a ground-breaking contribution to the discipline’. Prior existing scholarship was inadequate when critiquing works of art involving learning disabled performers. I addressed this gap, producing a detailed ethnography of performance practices, resulting in a new critical framework. Prior to my work, ways of talking about disability that did exist were inadequate as means of critically reflecting on works of art involving learning disabled performers. My book addressed this gap by undertaking a detailed ethnography developing a nuanced and original critical framework: this critical ‘poetics’ changed the emphasis from questions of curative benefit toward deeper engagement with aesthetic judgement, which also unmasked underlying stigma. My chapter ‘Dance with a Stranger’ (Alice O’Grady, Ed., Palgrave 2017), expanded these themes and focused on the impact of the central performer’s debilitating illness and led to the invitation to give the keynote address at the 2018 Australian Drama Studies Association conference in Melbourne: ‘Beyond Benevolence: Reframing Vulnerabilty in Theatre Scholarship’.

More recently my research has focused on stand-up comedians who utilise material about shame and stigma in their work. Support from Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research Seed Award (2019) initiated my investigation and resulted in the articles: ‘Stage Persona, stand-up comedy and mental health: Putting yourself out there’ (Persona Studies 2019); and ‘Stand-up Comedy as Recovery Narrative’ (Madness in Literature and Visual Culture 2026). Rather than dwelling on the need for certain attainable outcomes (stigma reduction; personal healing) I argue that more emphasis should be placed on intrinsic value and complexity of the art form: a transactional relationship risks placing an undue social burden on individual comedians and could be replaced with a relational one, that encourages more complex understanding of how madness might be perceived, illuminated and represented.

My next monograph, Deindustrialisation in Visual Cultures of Northern Britain, will focus on social class. First, it establishes the importance of ‘class melancholia’ as a new critical tool for, film and media studies and the creative industries, which can be deployed to understand representations of class, gentrification, social (im)mobility and regional decline; and also inform debates about right-wing populism. Second, utilising case studies from the first quarter of the 21^st century (from film and television, theatre, visual arts, and documentary, as well as autobiographical literary traditions), it seeks to reveal what Raymond Williams calls a ‘cultural formation’, that is, a shared set of aesthetic and cultural affinities between Northern artists over a twenty-year period. All the artists whose work is analysed in the book, have worked across different forms of media have, despite considerable success, witnessed a time of dwindling training and commissioning opportunities for artists of working-class origin; indeed several are currently putting their own resources into trying to address this at a structural level. At a time of such clear structural inequality, it is urgent that scholars build on Williams’ work. That is the third purpose this book: to survey what has made this formation so productive, and how its work can be built upon, so that working class artists and their representations can be sustained and supported into the future.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Class melancholia as critical intervention: Standing at the Sky's Edge (2022), Hargrave, M. 29 Dec 2025, In: Journal of Class and Culture
Stand-up Comedy as Recovery Narrative, Hargrave, M. 5 Dec 2025, Madness in Print and Visual Culture, London, Bloomsbury
Stage persona, stand-up comedy and mental health: 'Putting yourself out there', Hargrave, M. 7 Feb 2020, In: Persona Studies
Dance with a Stranger: Torque Show’s Intimacy (2014) and the Experience of Vulnerability in Performance and Spectatorship, Hargrave, M. Dec 2017, Risk, Participation, and Performance Practice, Springer
Theatres of learning disability: Good, bad, or plain ugly?, Hargrave, M. 1 Jan 2015
A proper actor? The politics of training for learning disabled actors, Gee, E., Hargrave, M. 2011, In: Theatre, Dance and Performance Training
Side effects: an analysis of Mind the Gap's Boo and the reception of theatre involving learning disabled actors, Hargrave, M. 2010, In: Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
Pure products go crazy, Hargrave, M. Feb 2009, In: Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
Good, bad or just plain ugly? Changing perceptions of the learning disabled actor, Hargrave, M. 2007, Planting trees of drama with global vision in local knowledge: IDEA 2007 dialogues, Hong Kong, IDEA Publications

PGR Supervision

Johanne Hauge Neurodivergent Performance Practice: overwhelm, multiplicity and speculation as neurodivergent logics Start Date: 01/10/2021 End Date: 14/10/2025

Qualifications