Professor Kim Samuel

Kim Samuel is a leading voice in the global movement for belonging.  She is the author of On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation (Abrams Press 2022), an exploration of the crisis of social isolation and humanity’s right to belong. She is also the founder of the Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness (SCSC), a research, advocacy, and action group that partners with and convenes leading academics and changemakers to combat social isolation and build belonging around the world. In 2024, she launched the Belonging Forum, a new solutions-focused initiative that completed a groundbreaking study on the state of belonging in the United Kingdom, drawing on survey data from 10,000 participants. 

Kim is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford, and an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. She regularly lectures at institutions including Oxford, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, and she created and taught a first-of-its-kind course in the study of social isolation at McGill University.