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 starting my PhD, I received an MA in Sustainable Urban Development with a focus on GIS and housing at DePaul University and worked at a Chicago nonprofit, where I planned numerous volunteer education projects for kids and teenageers and developed a neighborhood-led 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.

Joyce Percel (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography. Originally from Chicago, IL, her work is interdisciplinary and links critical data studies, black geographies, black feminism, critical property and housing studies, and urban geography. She is 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 understood, narrated, and planned. She is also interested in how Black and other racialized people and communities make place in neighborhoods where urban disinvestment and/or development threaten to erase these places and histories. Her doctoral research project focuses on data technologies and digital knowledge-making practices of housing and property data in Chicago.

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