Sam is an academic researcher, writer and lecturer. His work on contemporary poverty and inequality has been published widely in a range of different mediums. A geographer by training, Sam received his degrees from the University of Cambridge and has since been employed at a number of academic institutions around the UK – including Cambridge, Durham and Queen Mary London universities. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Nottingham University, and an Associate Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge.

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Sam’s current research examines lived experiences of inequality in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London. The project, entitled “Unequal Lives,” builds a wider appreciation of the social, cultural and felt effects inequality has on people’s daily lives. Before this, Sam worked on a project in the Valleys of South Wales, examining how people experience and manage the combined effects of poverty and austerity. Specifically, the work constructed a “People’s Geography of Poverty” by rendering impoverishment and immiseration through the vernacular languages, stories and spaces of those bearing the brunt of inequality.

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Along with fellow geographer Simon Reid-Henry, Sam co-convenes London Inequality Studies – a network of academics, researchers and activists with an interest in in/equality. He is also, with Ed Kiely of Cambridge University, part of a team convening Social Power and Mental Health – a forum and set of events fostering better dialogue between researchers, practitioners and those with expertise by experience (funded by CRASSH and the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness).

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His work has been published in a range of different academic journals, including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Antipode, Political Geography, Urban Geography, cultural geographies, Social & Cultural Geography, The Sociological Review and Geoforum. Sam is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and has contributed to the running of their Political Geography and Health and Wellbeing research groups.

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Sam’s academic work remains committed to not simply describing the world but finding ways of changing it for the better. As an ethnographer, this entails sustained and deep engagement with the people and places involved in his research and finding more socially just ways of ‘doing’ geography. He is also passionate about teaching and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.