Dr Sam Kinsley

Sam Kinsley is a leading scholar of digital geographies specialising in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. His research examines how technologies are governed and imagined, and how narratives and claims about AI and automation produce material political, social, and spatial effects. His current work focuses on how AI and automation are mobilised in visions of the future of governance and work, and the geographical contexts through which these futures are articulated.

Sam is Deputy Chair of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Digital Geographies Research Group and served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the open-access journal Digital Geography & Society from 2019 to 2025. From January 2022 to August 2024, Sam was Principal Investigator on the ESRC-funded project Algorithmic Politics after Brexit, which examined the rollout of the EU Settlement Scheme as a large-scale, digital-only system for governing and evidencing immigration status in post-Brexit Britain. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Advance HE.

Sam’s research advances critical geographical approaches to technology by analysing how AI and automation are defined, designed, and developed, and how they are used to frame understandings of political, cultural, and social change and imagined futures. His work interrogates what technologies such as AI are understood to be, and how they shape everyday experiences of society and space. This research informs his leadership and teaching in cultural and political geography at the University of Exeter, including dissertation supervision across a wide range of topics.

Sam is Director of Business Engagement and Innovation for Geography, with responsibility for business development and commercialisation, diversification of research income, and executive education. He received the Progress in Human Geography Best Paper Prize in 2015 for “The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies” and was appointed Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2016. Sam was awarded a PhD in Geography from the University of Bristol in 2010, funded by an ESRC studentship.