Joyce Percel

M.A., Sustainable Urban Development, DePaul University, 2018
GIS Certificate, DePaul University, 2018
B.S., Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2008

Prior to returning to graduate school, I worked at a Chicago nonprofit, where I planned numerous educational volunteer projects for school groups and developed a neighborhood-directed volunteer program. While working on my Master's degree, I completed 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 work is interdisciplinary and links critical data studies, black geographies, black feminism, critical property and housing studies, and urban geography. I am interested in the myriad ways that racialized people, communities, histories, and knowledge become – or do not become – encoded as data and how these data and related digital practices impact how different places in cities are conceptualized, narrated, and planned. I am also interested in how Black and other racialized people make place in urban neighborhoods where disinvestment and/or redevelopment continually threaten to erase these places and histories. My doctoral research project focuses on data assemblages and data-driven knowledge-making practices of housing and property in Chicago.

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