Dr Sam Kinsley

Sam is a leading scholar of digital geographies with a particular interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Sam's research principally concerns how technologies are governed and imagined, with a particular focus on how the stories we tell about automation and the claims made about AI have material effects in the world. His current research concerns how automation and artificial intelligence are imagined in relation to the future of governance and work and the geographies in which they are imagined to take place. 

Sam is Deputy Chair of the Digital Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society. Between 2019 and 2025 Sam was Co-Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Digital Geography & Society. Between January 2022 and August 2024 Sam was the Principle Investigator on the ESRC-funded project Algorithmic Politics after Brexit which examined the roll out of the European Union Settlement Scheme, a large digital-only scheme for gaining and proving the status of EU citizens in the UK, post-Brexit. Sam is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Higher Education Academy/AdvanceHE.

Sam's research interrogates and reveals the increasing importance of how we tell stories about AI and automation, and technologies more broadly, in our daily lives. There are two key themes: how we understand what a 'technology' like AI is or can be and how we make claims and tell stories about our sense of cultural, political or social change in relation to technologies like AI. Sam explores geographies of technology by unpicking what technologies like 'AI' are and how they are involved in our understandings and experiences of society and space. In turn this enables Sam to investigate two key elements of of AI and automation technologies: the geographies of the design and development of automation technologies and how these technologies are often instrumental in how we narrate and perceive political and social changes or the sense of a future. This work informs how he leads and contributes to the teaching of geography at Exeter, in particular modules concerning cultural and political geographies and dissertations on a range of topics.

Sam is the Director of Business Engagement and Innovation for Geography with responsibilites for the oversight of business devlopment & commercialisation, diversification of sources of research income and executive education in geography. In 2015 he received the Progress in Human Geography Best Paper Prize for the article "The matter of 'virtual' geographies". Sam was appointed a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2016. Sam is a Fellow of the RGS-IBG and Deputy Chair of the RGS-IBG Digital Geographies research group. Sam has previously contributed as committee member, web officer and treasurer for the RGS-IBG History and Philosophy of Geography research group between 2008-2017 and as an ordinary committee member for the RGS-IBG Social & Cultural Geography research group between 2013-2015. Sam was awarded a PhD in Geography from the University of Bristol in 2010, funded by a 1+3 studentship from the ESRC.