My name is Billy Southern, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography here at Penn State. I situate myself as an urban geographer, and my research interests involve thinking about economic segregation and sociospatial inequalities, the geographical concentration of poverty and affluence, and broadly how we make and remake our cities.
As an urban geographer, much of my research examines the geographical distribution of poverty and affluence throughout the urban realm to ask how trends in economic segregation have shifted in recent years. I'm also interested in asking how cities and their suburbs are planned to spatialize outcomes of advantage and disadvantage, and thinking about how the social and political mechanisms of local policy shape the wider social context. Methodologically, I look to use data-driven methods to illustrate trends and outcomes across urban and applied geography.
Beyond Penn State, much of my research has focused on the subfields of poverty and deprivation. Previously, I worked on the Encyclopedia of the Social and Solidarity Economy at the UN, while my other research has focused on the role of digital poverty in the Liverpool City Region, UK. I completed my master’s degree in Town and Regional Planning at the University of Liverpool, and I earned my bachelor’s degree in Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University.