Self
Embodiment, attention, capacity, imagination, ancestry, boundaries, recovery, and the inner relationships that shape outward action.
Relational Fields.
Explorations of the work of beings at many scales—and of the loops through which self, space, and society become one another’s environment.
Social equity is approached here as an emergent relationship, not a slogan or finished condition: something shaped through access, history, labor, land, material flows, care, authority, and the ability of different beings to participate without erasure.
An American Studies–informed notebook
Plural, place-based, and unfinished.
Sahar’s ongoing American Studies coursework at UC Davis offers one useful lens for this notebook—not a single identity to impose.
These essays examine how land, ancestry, Indigenous presence, migration, settlement, enslavement, labor, ecology, spirituality, disability, race, class, gender, technology, and civic institutions meet in places called America. The aim is not to flatten those histories into one story. It is to ask how more inclusive forms of belonging and material participation might emerge while difference, power, and specific lineage remain legible.
Some pieces begin in first-person experience. Others may begin with a policy, a landscape, an organization, an animal, a building method, or a public proposal. Each asks what relationships are doing the work, whose work is visible, and what the system makes possible.
Four reading scales
Space
Home, land, habitat, tools, food, water, materials, movement, and the arrangements that make some forms of life easier than others.
Society
Labor, credit, access, policy, institutions, collective memory, governance, and the public conditions through which equity can emerge—or fail to.
Relational loops
The recurring exchanges through which selves alter spaces, spaces organize society, and social systems return as intimate and ecological conditions.
Anonymized pattern studies
The location changes. The questions travel.
Sahar has encountered versions of extraction, boundary failure, invisible contribution, and one-way resource flow across multiple organizations and relationships. The collection can hold those stories without turning proper names into the organizing principle.
- 01
Observe across scale
Notice recurring relationships among access, vulnerability, labor, credit, consent, authority, material resources, and the ability to withdraw—from an intimate room to a public institution.
- 02
Protect the particular
Anonymize people and organizations when a public name would generate more spectacle than learning. Preserve a private chronology, source record, and the option of specific accountability elsewhere.
- 03
Distinguish severity
Compare mechanisms without pretending all harms are equivalent. A blurred committee boundary is not trafficking; both may still teach us to examine how vulnerability becomes access and how refusal is handled.
- 04
Alter the container
Translate insight into operating conditions: meaningful choice, clear roles, accessible participation, attributed labor, reciprocal benefit, documented consent, usable feedback, and a non-retaliatory exit.
A survivor-informed American Studies proposition
Environment and equity are mutually producing.
A recurring American cultural blindness is the treatment of people, land, knowledge, and care as available inputs while the authority to name value remains concentrated elsewhere.
This is a situated proposition, informed by Sahar’s ongoing American Studies coursework, field research, and sustained engagement with lived-experience perspectives—not a completed theory of every American institution. Standardization, professional hierarchy, ownership, charity, individualism, and the language of opportunity can all appear neutral while obscuring whose contribution is absorbed, whose vulnerability is converted into access, and whose refusal carries consequences.
Environmental design and social equity are therefore treated as synchronous and mutually producing. The arrangement of housing, food, land, tools, transportation, labor, money, information, authority, and safety produces social conditions. Social power then determines who may shape, inhabit, maintain, benefit from, or leave those environments.
Equity, accessibility, inclusion, and human-centered design are not decorative values here. They are operating prompts: Who can enter? What can they refuse? What must change in the container? Who is credited and compensated? What support makes participation usable? How can someone pause or leave without losing safety, standing, or authorship? Human-centered cannot mean human-only; soil, water, plants, animals, materials, and future maintainers also shape the answer.
From subtle awareness to practical skill
Practice is primary. Language is supportive. Symbolism is optional.
Elemental fluency becomes credible when it improves observation, coordination, learning, and material care—not when metaphor is presented as scientific proof.
- 01
Sense
Notice subtle cues and changing conditions in bodies, relationships, weather, water, soil, light, timing, attention, access, and workload.
- 02
Translate
Turn an energetic or symbolic impression into an observable question: What is moving? What is blocked? Who maintains it? What material condition could be checked?
- 03
Practice
Learn through bounded action—soil building, irrigation observation, propagation, food growing, tool care, accessible hosting, documentation, and shared stewardship.
- 04
Demonstrate
Build credibility through records, outcomes, feedback, repeatable skills, and responsible collaboration. Demonstrated competence matters; it does not fabricate a degree, license, or scientific authority.
Current studies
Explore the opening collection.
Working and author-held editions preserve inquiry in motion. Their publication status is named rather than implied.
Embodiment Without Erasure
Attribution, ancestry, material resilience, and the institutional shadow of healing work.
An earlier experience inside embodied-healing work becomes a practical inquiry into credit, consent, material conditions, and the structures required to hold spiritual language accountable.
Read the working essayDistortion, Stomp, and the Feminist Body
How rock alters gender from the inside out.
A first-person argument that distortion and control of timing can function as a feminist listening practice—giving listeners agency over pace, interpretation, and emotional attention. Slowed-and-reverb ‘rock drag,’ embodied listening, cultural memory, and the limits of alteration connect the essay directly to Baile’s emerging music-and-Möbius inquiry.
Full text publication forthcoming.
Questions entering the archive
A field large enough for more than human life.
- How does an intimate boundary become an environmental design question?
- What can a garden reveal about labor, access, memory, and public belonging?
- How do institutions inherit patterns that no individual consciously chose?
- What forms of equity emerge when people, places, materials, and other living beings can answer one another?
- Which American stories become possible when ancestry, migration, land, disability, race, class, gender, and multispecies life remain visible together?