Dr Sam Kinsley

Sam is a leading scholar of digital geographies with a particular interest in automation and the future. Sam's research principally concerns how technologies and technical practices are designed and imagined and what this tells us about how we experience and imagine society and space. His current research concerns geographical imaginaries of automation. Sam is a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Digital Geography & Society. Between January 2022 and August 2024 Sam is the Principle Investigator on the ESRC-funded project Algorithmic Politics after Brexit. 

Sam's research reveals the increasing importance of how we tell stories about the technologies in our daily lives. There are two key themes: how we understand what a 'technology' is or can be and how we narrate a sense of cultural, political or social change in relation to technology. Sam explores geographies of technology by unpicking what 'technologies' 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 technology: the geographies of the design and development of technology and how technology is 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 was promoted to Senior Lecturer in December 2018. In 2015 he received the Progress in Human Geography Best Paper Prize for the article "The matter of 'virtual' geographies". Through participation in continuing professional development Sam was appointed a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2016. Between September 2013 and February 2015 Sam was a co-investigator on the ESRC-funded Contagion project concerning understandings of contagious phenomena, leading a work package focused on digital media. Before lecturing at Exeter, Sam worked as a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures at UWE, Bristol, between 2010 and 2013. Between November 2009 and June 2010 Sam worked as an RA with Prof. Martin Weller in the Institute of Educational Technology, at the Open University, investigating practices and rationales for digital scholarship. I have a PhD in Geography from the University of Bristol, for which he received a 1+3 studentship from the ESRC. Sam is a serving as a committee member of the RGS-IBG Digital Geographies research group. Sam has previously and variously contributed as committee member, web officer and tresurer 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 convened the Exeter Geography human geography seminar series between 2013-2015 and served as the communications officer for the department between 2015-2019. Sam currently supports academic online video production in the department.