Staff profile

Sam Berlin is a teaching fellow in human geography at Durham University. His research is broadly concerned with the everyday politics of futurity, particularly in relation to development, security and gender. Sam's work is focused on the following three main themes:

• The everyday politics of development, labour and class in China;
• Everyday life in securitized cities in the UK and Western Europe, and competing visions of security;
• Trans experiences of everyday life.

Sam received his PhD in Geography from the University of Bristol in 2021. His doctoral research examined everyday class politics and cultures of development in contemporary China through an ethnography of shopkeepers in a small Chinese city. From 2021-2023, Sam worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Plymouth on the ORA/ESRC-funded project Atmospheres of (counter)terrorism in European cities. The interdisciplinary project is a three-country collaboration aimed at understanding how securitization and the threat of terrorism are changing the felt exprience of everyday urban life and remoulding cities around competing imaginaries of their futures. Sam also holds a BA in Chinese and Geography from SOAS, University of London, and an MSc in Human Geography (Society and Space) from the University of Bristol. 

Chapter in book

• Berlin, S., & Brice, S. (2022). The ontopolitics of gender as transindividual relation. In C. Cremin (Ed.), Deleuze, Guattari, and the Schizoanalysis of Trans Studies (9-34). Bloomsbury

Journal Article

• Fregonese, S., Simpson, P., Masson, D., Runkel, S., Benjamin, C. A., Berlin, S., Ciax, K., & Drongiti, A. (2024). Atmospheric geographies of (counter)terrorism. Progress in Human Geography, 48(6), 752-778. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325241268951
• Berlin, S. (2024). Cultures of labour: aspiration, developmental futures and the materiality of memory after Chinese economic reform. Social and Cultural Geography, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2024.2342833