Samuel L. Hunter

Sam Hunter is an interdisciplinary educator and scholar working at the intersections of media and technology studies, queer studies, and critical theory. His research examines how media texts and technologies shape human living through the formation of social 'common sense,' circulation of counter-hegemonic ideas, and integration of various kinds of 'users' into processes of capital accumulation and social organization. His work has been recognized by a Dissertation Year Award from UCLA, a fellowship with the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' Caucus on Class Graduate Student and Precarious Scholar Writing Award.

His doctoral dissertation investigated the relationship between utopian desires and queer computation in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s. Drawing upon original historical research to tell the stories of Digital Queers, an activist organization based in Silicon Valley which offered computer equipment and training to other queer non-profits and PlanetOut, a queer social media platform and multimedia conglomerate, the project aimed to show how utopian desires for digital technology to automatically resolve social problems animated queer activist, corporate, and scholarly activities during a historical moment structured by the consolidation of neoliberal globalization and broad uptake of networked computing. He is now expanding this work temporally to include case studies from the 2010s and 2020s and reframing the analysis to address social reproductive crises that have been especially intensifying following the 2008 financial crisis and 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. This book project will connect the late twentieth century "end of history" to the contradictions inherent to the maintenance and renewal of labor-power under capitalism by examining the intersection of digital systems and Internet culture with gender & sexuality.

He is also a Co-Chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' Precarious Labor Organization and the Precarious Labor Representative to SCMS's Caucus on Class.