Degrees

• M.A Sociology, National Taiwan University, 2021
• B.A Chinese (Modern and Classical), SOAS University of London, 2019

Fields of Study

Subfields: Political Sociology; Digital Sociology; Sociology of Science; Global Sociology; Taiwan

Research

My work sits at the intersection of democracy, security, and scientific knowledge. As states increasingly rely on experts to manage technical risk, medical risk or security risks, I ask what this means for democratic participation. How do different social actors try to engage in political decision making and represent ‘the public’ when the problems in question seem to require expert knowledge? Are ‘democracy’ and ‘security’ inherently opposed? I use Taiwan as my primary case because it faces many of these tensions acutely: a still-recent democratic transition; pervasive exposure to military (and environmental) threats; and a globally-leading technology economy. 

My dissertation focuses on the politics of ‘digital sovereignty’ in Taiwan, examining how the government, industry groups, and civil society groups are thinking about how to regulate, demarcate and control cyberspace. With the mass proliferation of AI infrastructure worldwide and the persistent threat of online hacking, scams and digital infrastructure attacks, a range of actors have proposed new ways to resolve these issues. Often these involve different trade offs between economic development, democratic values of ‘openness’, and questions of security. Specifically, I will be focusing on Taiwan’s push for AI sovereignty and the attempts to create an AI model trained only on Taiwanese data. If “computational power is national power”, (算力即國力), I ask, what form of national power is being cultivated? 

My other work extends this inquiry across different sites. I am preparing a paper on Taiwan’s civic hacker community (g0v) and the different strategies they have used to try to build participatory and  forms of public political engagement while retaining their technology and technical core. In the United States context, I have carried out research with frontline mental health workers in post-mass-violence community centers, where clinical expertise and community need can pull in opposite directions. Workers often have to navigate this tension with little institutional support. I also have a historical side project on the way political transformations in the 1990s encouraged progressive and feminist social movement to re-appropriate the politics of ‘law and order’ in Taiwan. 

Publications

• Academic Publications 
  Wu, Chia-Ling, Wei-Hong Chen, Sam Robbins, and Hinata Sakai. 2025. “Success Rates and Success Stories: Staging Anticipation on Fertility Clinic Websites in Taiwan, Japan, and the UK.” Social Science & Medicine 366:117655. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117655.
  Public Scholarship (selected)
• Robbins, Sam. 2024. “Digital Human Rights”. Taiwan Human Rights Hub. https://taiwanhumanrightshub.org/2024/09/07/digital-human-rights/
• Robbins, Sam and Chia-Shuo Tang. 2022. “Hopes and Concerns for Taiwan’s New Ministry of Digital Affairs”. The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/hopes-and-concerns-for-taiwans-new-ministry-of-digital-affairs/
• Robbins, Sam. 2022. Let’s Stop Calling Taiwan a “Digital Democracy” (And Start Telling Better Digital Stories). The News Lens International

Awards & Grants

• Fulbright Scholarship, Taiwan, 2026-2027
• Global Taiwan Institute Scholarship, 2026 (deferred to 2027)
• Taiwan Studies Fellowship Grant, 2026
• Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, 2026
• Graduate Research Mentorship, 2025-2026
• Taiwan Studies Fellowship Grant, 2025
• Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, 2025
• Graduate Research Mentorship, 2024-2025
• Taiwan Ministry of Education Scholarship, 2019-2021

Conference Presentations

• 2026. “Digital sovereignty in Taiwan: controlling the internet in the Tsai and Lai Era”  Invited talk at the Taiwan Studies Summer School, SOAS University of London
• 2026. “Digital democracy in Taiwan: opening the internet in the Ma and Tsai era”  Invited talk at the Taiwan Studies Summer School, SOAS University of London