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Staff profile

Overview

Dr Sam Berlin

Teaching Fellow

Affiliations
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Teaching Fellow in the Department of Geography

Biography

I am a geographer working at the intersection of cultural and development geographies. My research is motivated by an interest in how people understand development and find their place in rapidly changing worlds. From this starting point, my work explores how knowledges and imaginaries of what development looks like and what futures it promises shape lives in the present. Specifically, I use ethnographic research on everyday life, labour and economic change in peri-urban and peripheral regions of China to reassess the social impacts of neoliberalism from a Global South perspective.

Before returning to academia, I lived in a number of cities around China, first studying in Beijing before the 2008 Olympics, and then living in Chongqing and Shanghai, where I worked as a translator. During this time, I saw my own life change dramatically and saw these changes reflected even more palpably in the lives of my Chinese friends, neighbours and coworkers, whose material worlds became vastly more comfortable while their life trajectories became ever more unpredictable. As urban infrastructure improved, new housing went up and incomes rose, I noticed people around me changing careers again and again, constantly reimagining themselves to avoid being left behind in an economy in flux.

Living in this environment, I started wondering how it could be that what was only recently a socialist society had reoriented itself so quickly towards entrepreneurial individualism and self-negating labour practices, whose benefits would be felt primarily by future generations. I began finding answers to these questions during doctoral fieldwork in ‘Lainan’, a small city in Shandong Province, where I carried out ethnographic research into the lives of small traders on a market street from 2017-2018. In Lainan, I witnessed how chaotic China’s developmental miracle can look, as small traders recounted to me complex, non-linear resumés including combinations of farming, factory labour, service work, simple family businesses, and even pyramid schemes. I have since returned to Lainan for follow-up fieldwork and have also conducted research on touristic experiences of China’s less-developed periphery based on fieldwork in Yunnan Province in China's southwest.

At the core of these projects is a focus on how people narrativize their senses of self and make sense of the developmental project they are participating in, which I approach through a combination of participant observation and life history interviewing. These narratives reveal the dangers of portraying the subjects of development as straightforwardly rational economic actors. Participants in my research refer just as frequently to weather conditions, religious discrimination, divorces, friendships, illness, self-image and adventure as they do to a desire to maximize incomes while minimizing risk.

In addition to this strand of research, from 2021-2023, I 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 experience of everyday urban life and remoulding cities. I have also conducted research on the politics of everyday life among trans people in the UK. This research forms part of a larger interest in queer and trans geographies, which informs a significant portion of my teaching. 

I hold a BA in Chinese and Geography from SOAS, University of London, an MSc in Human Geography (Society and Space) from the University of Bristol, and a PhD in Geography, also from the University of Bristol.