Sam Hunter, Ph.D. Candidate in Cinema & Media Studies, UCLA

I’ve been enrolled in UCLA’s Cinema & Media Studies graduate program since 2019 after completing my B.A. and M.A. at Miami University (Ohio). My research interests broadly include queer media culture, the Internet/digital media, and critiques of political economy. I also teach film and television history, media theory, and media pedagogy.

My dissertation-in-progress scans the queer Internet from the early 1990s to the present for coincidences of utopian articulations and the accumulation of capital. I aim to show how utopian thinking animated multifarious discourses emerging with the early Internet, including both Capital’s postmodern entrenchment and more radical potentialities. By a Queer Marxist theoretical methodology, my project demonstrates how capitalism successfully utilized desires for a better world to fashion digital networks as machines for accumulation and gestures towards different ways of living.

I also serve as a Head Steward for UAW Local 2865, the union for Academic Student Employees and Graduate Student Researchers at the University of California, and as a Co-Chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Precarious Labor Organization.