Luke Temple

Dr Luke Temple serves as Lecturer in Political Geography and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Sheffield's School of Geography and Planning. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he actively contributes to the Political Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society and previously co-edited the British Politics and Policy Blog at LSE.

His academic journey includes BA, MSc, and PhD qualifications, with doctoral completion in the Department of Geography at Sheffield in 2018. His thesis examined connections between citizens' conceptualizations of democracy and political participation.

Temple's research centers on political and electoral geography, democratic theory, and digital political engagement. His work investigates how digital technologies transform campaigning and participation, particularly examining rural-urban divides in electoral behavior and crisis-driven political activism. Recent publications analyze non-party campaigning spaces, digital party organization, and deprivation's impact on political attitudes.

His publication trajectory from 2016-2025 reveals consistent focus on electoral geography's digital evolution, with increasing attention to rural campaigning dynamics and crisis-related political behavior. Key contributions include methodological innovations in digital campaign analysis and critical assessments of digital campaigning's impact on democratic processes.

His professional recognition includes:

• Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Temple has contributed to major research initiatives including the multinational LIVEWHAT Project on economic crises, the Renewing Party Politics Project, and EU Referendum analysis regarding media's role in scale conceptualization. His teaching philosophy emphasizes inclusive debate and real-world methodological application across modules like Democracy and Citizenship, Critical Digital Geographies, and Advanced Quantitative Methods.

As an active committee member of the Royal Geographical Society's Political Geographies Research Group, he shapes disciplinary discourse while developing innovative approaches to statistics pedagogy in geography education through projects like the WRDS statistics teaching initiative.