Matthew P. Unger is Assistant Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. His work questions how conditions of aesthetic and juridical judgment have changed in a post-critical age.

His work broadly encompasses sound studies, ethnography/participant observation within the extreme metal community, phenomenology and hermeneutics of criminal accusation, and colonial legal imaginaries. He examines how predominant metaphors and symbols structure aesthetic, sonic, and legal imaginaries. His continuing projects focus on the relationship of accusation to governance. The other lines of investigation on symbols and sound focus on cultural and musical competence, formal and informal pedagogies, and genre.

He is the author of Sound, Symbol, Sociality: The Aesthetics of Extreme Metal Music (2016 with Palgrave MacMillan) which draws on the social theory of Paul Ricoeur to understand the intersection of the social, juridical, religious, and political within aesthetic judgment. He is co-editor (with George Pavlich) of Accusation: Creating Criminals (UBC Press, 2016) and Entryways to Criminal Justice: Accusation and Criminalization in Canada (Forthcoming with University of Alberta Press 2019).