Research (Copy)
Calendar of Consumption: Understanding the Spatial and Material Implications of American Holiday Practice
Harvard University | 2017–2019 | Masters Thesis
Throughout history humans have found need to mark time through collective acts of celebration and ritual in response to the cyclical and vital fluctuations of celestial movements, climatic changes, and terrestrial abundance. In time, these ancient communal rites, or holidays as we now know them, were manipulated from recognitions of abundance, death, and revivant vitality into tools of conquest, assimilation, and extraction. In contemporary American culture, the remains of ancient and historic festivals are annually manifest across the United States as holidays—chief among them Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas—all major socioeconomic forces determined to reproduce a semblance of the abundances out of which they each arose. Holidays, as human practices stemming from the ecological and agricultural phenomena of the landscape translated over time into manifold sociospatial constructions, should be understood as an ephemeral urban morphology producing byproducts of waste, exploitation, and subjugation through projected economic and cultural norms.
The Road Ahead: Reimagining Mobility
Cooper Hewitt | 2018 | Intern Curator
While working as an Intern Curator in Socially Responsible Design, Samuel conducted extensive research on the future of mobility that was later incorporated into the exhibition. Topics of research included experimental vehicles, innovations in public transit, artificial intelligence and empathy, projective urban and regional masterplanning, access and equity in mobility services, and health and mobility in low-density, rural spaces.
Not Your Average Snowbird: Urban Development for Aging Expats in Mexico
García Robles Fulbright Fellowship | 2019 | Semi-Finalist
Popular conceptions of the US-Mexico border focus on the flow of economic migrants from Mexico into the United States, often denigrating those seeking a better life by responding to the valuative differential of their labor as defined by economic territories. Meanwhile, those crossing into Mexico and utilizing the same power of arbitrage to stretch their IRAs and social security a little further remain unscrutinized if not altogether unnoticed. These retired American expats, the snowbirds in question, are now driving unique urbanization at a variety of scales ranging from the discreet remodeling of commercial enterprises to the construction of coastal retirement villages. At the same time, constitutionally provided systems of communal land tenure (ejidos) originally intended to protect rural populations are one of the few bulwarks against such development. In the past few decades these ejidal provisions have fallen under fire by neoliberal politicians favoring rural public divestment, threatening . This investigation aims to expose the the increasingly hybridized milieus—both social and spatial—arising throughout Mexico as a result of uneven economic development in North America, question hegemonic paradigms of spatial politics, and reveal the border as mutually porous, transgressed by actors on both sides for economic and social gain.
Stress-Sex Soundscape
Harvard University | 2018 | Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation
Students at the Graduate School of Design are practically synonymous with “stress.” It’s a topic of nearly every conversation and palpable throughout Gund Hall. Their more intimate relations, however, are a bit more apt to fly under the radar. This project—part map; part music box—elucidates the relationship between physical and sexual tension as it plays out across the greater Boston area.