Rate My Professor Matt Lumb

Dr. Matt Lumb serves as Associate Director of the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His dedication to educational access originated from his roles as a community development professional working on projects in Australia, Asia, and Africa, and as a classroom teacher in New South Wales public high schools. During his time at UNICEF, he acted as Education for Development Coordinator, managing school and community fundraising and advocacy initiatives such as UNICEF Day for Change in partnership with NSW Department of Education and Teachers Federation. As International Projects Officer for Monitoring and Evaluation, he liaised between stakeholders in development contexts and produced evaluation reports, involving fieldwork in Zambia on HIV/AIDS prevention, Laos on child protection from unexploded ordnance, Indonesia on polio vaccination, Vietnam on iodine deficiency, and Fiji on health technologies. Subsequently, with Australian Red Cross, he served as Refugee Support Coordinator and managed the Tenant Connect community service. Since joining the University of Newcastle in 2011 as an outreach practitioner, he progressed to completing a PhD examining unintended consequences of university outreach connections and advanced to his current leadership role in the Centre.

Lumb earned his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Newcastle. His research interests include community development, critical pedagogy, educational access and participation, equity, evaluation, international development, social inequalities, social justice, sociology of education, and widening participation, with primary fields in sociology of education (50%), higher education (25%), and applied sociology, program evaluation, and social impact assessment (25%). He emphasizes sophisticated participatory methodologies for generative evaluation. Major publications feature the co-authored book Equity in Higher Education: Time for Social Justice Praxis (2024) with Penny Jane Burke, including chapters such as 'Introduction – time for equity praxis,' 'From deficit imaginaries to social justice reframing,' and 'Hegemonic evaluation as a governing gaze.' Key journal articles encompass 'Critiquing uncritical EDI in higher education' (2025, Teaching in Higher Education), '‘I felt like I was the only person in the world studying’: place and affect in the constitution of online higher education study for rural Australian students' (2025, Australian Educational Researcher), 'What are the affordances of the digital music space in alternative education?' (2021, International Journal of Music Education), and 'Researching and evaluating equity and widening participation: praxis-based frameworks' (2018). His scholarship critiques dominant higher education imaginaries, advocates counter-hegemonic practices, and fosters social justice praxis in equity and widening participation.