Joyce Percel
Positions
Doctoral Student
Contact information
Background
Educational Background
MA Sustainable Urban Development, DePaul University, 2018
GIS Certificate DePaul University, 2018
BS Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2008
Biography
I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary. Before graduate school, I worked at a Chicago non-profit, where I planned educational volunteer projects for school-aged youth and worked directly with various community groups and non-profit organizations to develop programming. Through my work and the relationships I developed, I became interested in learning more deeply about the structural processes around social issues in Chicago, and how to translate that knowledge into technical analyses, public policy, and community support.
These growing interests led me to pursue a Master's Degree in Sustainable Urban Development, where I learned valuable analysis tools through Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and statistical analysis programs. While in my Master's program, I completed analytical projects ranging from a property sales analysis in partnership with a local housing justice organization to a geospatial model used by the City of Chicago’s Department of Housing. My continued curiosity in the structural processes around social issues in Chicago pushed me into pursuing a PhD, where I think through the social and economic relations between race, data, and property.
My work is interdisciplinary and links critical data studies, black geographies, black feminism, critical property and housing studies, and urban geography. My doctoral research project studies how racial and colonial logics appear in property data, and the ways in which people with varying technical and racial knowledges - from data analysts to affordable housing advocates to artists - use and interact with data to disrupt these logics.
Research
Areas of Research
Critical data studies, data ethics, data and algorithmic governance, critical GIS
Black geographies, racial capitalism, black feminism, settler colonialism
Affordable housing, decolonial theories of land, racial regimes of property, alternative forms of housing and property ownership
Disinvestment, gentrification and redevelopment, urban placemaking, data-driven governance
Awards
- Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship —Doctoral, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). 2021
- Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship, Govertment of Alberta. 2020
Publications
- Hauntings of Absence and Erasure: Black Archival Practices of Property Data. Joyce Percel. Antipode. (2024)
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