Research
I am an urban anthropologist who studies the politics of collective provision amid climate change and late industrialism. Working in Germany and the United States, I examine how public visions of a better future take material form, and how the systems built to realize those visions create new problems of governance. Across my projects, I ask how ownership and infrastructure shape governing capacity and equity as social and environmental conditions change.
Urban restructuring and socialist legacies
My book, The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany’s Model Socialist City (Cornell University Press, 2026), examines the transformation of Eisenhüttenstadt, founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt. After German reunification, the city lost over half its population. I trace how urban restructuring reoriented socialist commitments to collective life toward the challenges of population loss, asking how ownership creates the capacity to govern and how cities can pursue alternative futures beyond growth.
Industrial infrastructure and the energy transition
My current research in Eisenhüttenstadt examines the relationship between the steelworks and the city’s district heating system, which recovers industrial energy to heat homes. I ask how institutions can plan for decarbonization when the future of this shared infrastructure is uncertain, and how carbon accounting distributes responsibility between the city and the steelworks. This work develops an anthropology of throughput: an account of how institutions classify and reorganize material flows to govern collective life. It connects the practical decisions of municipal and industrial actors to broader questions about the infrastructures inherited from socialism and their place in the energy transition.
Rewilding and public responsibility
A second book project extends these questions from the city to the landscape. In Anklamer Heath and the German–Polish Oder Delta, I examine rewilding and ecological self-organization. A dike breach in 1995 that was left unrepaired offers a starting point for asking what happens when human intervention gives way to ecological processes. I investigate how restoration changes understandings of government responsibility and how the futures imagined for these landscapes bring conservation into tension with other uses of land. The project asks how collective life might be organized around ecological change and futures beyond growth.
Electricity markets and equity
In collaboration with researchers at Lehigh University and The Ohio State University, I study how retail electricity markets distribute costs and choices among households in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Connecting consumer interviews and electricity bills with quantitative market analysis, this work brings an anthropological perspective to energy justice and the governance of essential services.
Read more about Energy Markets & Policy
Selected publications
Fox, Samantha. 2026. The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany’s Model Socialist City. Cornell University Press. Book overview.
Dormady, Noah, Jenya Kahn-Lang, Yiseon Choi, Yufan Ji, Samantha Fox, Alberto Lamadrid, and Matthew Hoyt. 2026. “Public Management of Deregulated Systems: Challenges and Opportunities in the Public Management of Retail Energy Markets.” Public Administration Review. Read article.
Fox, Samantha Maurer. 2025. “The Space-Age Hotel: Ruination and Negative Value in the Former East Germany.” American Ethnologist 52 (4): 446–58. Read article.
Fox, Samantha Maurer. 2024. “A City of Newcomers: Migration and Solidarity in the Former East Germany.” City & Society 36 (2): 67–77. Read article.
Fox, Samantha M. 2020. “Street Lighting and the Uneasy Coexistence of Socialist and Capitalist Urban Imaginaries.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38 (4): 646–63. Read article.