Sam Hunter

Sam Hunter is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research is broadly addressed to media studies and gender & sexuality studies with emphases in new media, queerness, and political economy. He is often drawn to thinking about how media—including film, television, and digital images/networks—shape and are shaped in turn by social common senses and material relations of production and consumption. Systems of marginalization and the potential for liberation in the past, present, and future are often at the center of his work. His research has been recognized by numerous awards, including a UCLA Dissertation Year Award, a Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Research Fellowship, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Caucus on Class Graduate Student & Precarious Scholar Essay Award, and the Teshome Gabriel Memorial Award. He has also presented his work at multiple conferences, including SCMS, the American Studies Association, Console-ing Passions, and the UC Santa Barbara Carsey-Wolf Center Annual Conference. He is also co-chair of SCMS’s Precarious Labor Organization.

His dissertation, “Digital Queerdom: Utopian Desire and the Early Queer Internet,” situates the utopian activist, corporate, and consumer practices associated with computation and the queer Internet in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s within the genealogy of digital networks’ political economy. This historical and theoretical work considers how queer people’s desires for the Internet to be an effective medium for social connection and community building encountered new media technologies built by for-profit companies. The archivally researched case studies of two U.S. organizations, activist group Digital Queers and early social media company PlanetOut, reveals the similarity and occasional interdependence of desires for queer access to better living and desires for digital media to resolve social contradictions without wealth redistribution, showing how late capitalism routes oppositional forces back into capital accumulation while pretending such actions are improving marginalized lives.

Research Interests

Computation & the Internet, queer media, political economy, critical theory

Education

Ph.D., Cinema and Media Studies, UCLA (in progress)
M.A., English Literature, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 2019
B.A., English Creative Writing & Literature, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 2018

Selected accomplishments and professional work

Curriculum Vitae

Sam Hunter CV