Samuel N Chamber

Biographic Data

ID1340798
NAMESamuel N Chamber
GIVEN NAMESSamuel N
FAMILY NAMEChamber
SIGNATURECHAMBER S N
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Arizona
ORCID0000-0002-4734-2855
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS9
TOTAL CITATIONS46
AUTHOR COUNT9
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2019
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX4

  • Manufacturing Desolation

    Open AccessGerard Boyce, Geoff Boyce et al.ARTICLEAnnals of the American…2025References: 33

    U.S. boundary enforcement has long been organized around an effort to redirect unauthorized border crossing into remote and inhospitable expanses of desert terrain. Using southern Arizona’s West Desert corridor as a case study, this article explores how these two conditions have been actively cultivated over time. First, we describe the twentieth-century use of military and conservation rationales to remove indigenous O’odham, Mexican-American, a…

  • The geography of intent

    Open AccessSamuel N Chamber, Samuel N Chambers et al.ARTICLEPolitical Geography2025Cited by: 1References: 41

  • Dehydration Rate and a Novel Model to Aid Search and Relief for Undocumented Border Crossers in the Sonoran Desert

    Samuel N Chamber, Samuel N Chambers et al.ARTICLEThe Professional Geographer2022

    There has been a proliferation of geographic literature exploring the fatal effects of immigration policy since the early 2000s. Studies have used geographic information systems (GIS) and predictive modeling to explore potential relationships between border protection infrastructure, environment, and migrant death. Although some studies have used GIS to determine the probable effects of heat stress, none have included the potential perspiration a…

  • Climate impact or policy choice? The spatiotemporality of thermoregulation and border crosser mortality in southern Arizona

    Open AccessSamuel N Chamber, Samuel N Chambers et al.ARTICLEGeographical Journal2022Cited by: 8References: 62

    US public officials frequently argue that high temperatures are responsible for increasing mortality of undocumented border crossers (UBCs) in southern Arizona. In this article, we suggest that these kinds of assertions are not only empirically misleading, they also serve to naturalise UBC deaths in the region by helping to obscure their structural causes. Indeed, although heat exposure is a primary cause of death in the region, prior studies hav…

  • Mortality, Surveillance and the Tertiary “Funnel Effect” on the U.S.-Mexico Border

    Samuel N Chamber, Gerard Boyce et al.ARTICLEJournal of Borderlands Studies2021

    Theories of migration deterrence have long posited that border enforcement infrastructure pushes migration routes into more rugged and deadly terrain, driving an increase in migrant mortality. Applying geospatial analysis of landscape and human variables in one highly-trafficked corridor of the Arizona / Sonora border, we test whether the expansion of surveillance infrastructure has in fact shifted migrants’ routes toward areas that are more remo…

  • The corral apparatus

    Open AccessGerard Boyce, Geoffrey Alan Boyce et al.ARTICLEGeoforum2021Cited by: 15References: 13

  • Indigenous Survival and Settler Colonial Dispossession on the Mexican Frontier

    Blake Gentry, Gerard Boyce et al.ARTICLEJournal of Latin American geography2019

    This paper applies the framework of settler colonialism to examine three generations of land struggle involving the Tohono O’odham communities of Wo’oson and Cedagĭ Wahia in Sonora, Mexico. It traces how post-Revolutionary land and water reforms allowed for the consolidation of an extractive ranching economy that relied upon the dispossession of customary land and water sources accessed seasonally by Tohono O’odham (“desert peoples”). In the cont…

  • Bodily Inertia and the Weaponization of the Sonoran Desert in US Boundary Enforcement

    Open AccessGerard Boyce, Samuel N Chamber et al.ARTICLEJournal on Migration and Human…2019Cited by: 16References: 12

    Executive Summary This article conducts geographic information system (GIS) modeling of unauthorized migration routes in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona and finds an increase in the ruggedness of terrain crossed by pedestrian travelers throughout time. The modeling of ruggedness incorporates multiple variables that include slope, vegetation, “jaggedness,” and ground temperature, and provides an alternative to Euclidian distance as a way of…

  • The spatiotemporal forming of a state of exception

    Open AccessSamuel N ChamberARTICLEGeoJournal2019Cited by: 6References: 13