Tyler W. McDaniel

I am a sociologist who studies how spatial inequalities are produced. By spatial inequalities, I mean inequalities that occur across geographic regions or boundaries, which may be created or reinforced through processes of land management and place-based governance. For example, I have analyzed the relationship between activity spaces - where people work, shop, worship, and recreate - and school choices in Los Angeles, a metropolitan region where school choice policies prevail. I use spatial and quantitative methods to examine these relationships over time, and contextualize the findings in existing knowledge around ethnoracial segregation processes in neighborhoods and schools. 

In my dissertation, I focus on my home state of North Carolina to explore how climate disasters influence spatial inequalities for K-12 students. I consider how disruptions to schooling, residential and school displacement, and recoveries to natural disasters vary across places. I use student records from North Carolina and fine-grain hurricane flooding data to measure causal impacts of extreme flooding events on student attendance and learning outcomes, mobility processes and demographic change, and future flooding risks. As climate disasters continue to outpace government mitigation efforts, my research informs how these events are likely to affect schools and communities. 

I am also interested in educating for our data-rich age. As a teacher, I draw connections between social systems and the tools that we use to analyze societies. I designed a class, "Analytics for a Changing Climate," which introduced students to data science through the lens of the changing climate, for example, using mapping techniques to study environmental hazards across space and using network methods to analyze IPCC authorship. I have assisted in teaching courses in economic sociology, social psychology, and computational social science; and regularly teach classes on a wide range of topics with the Stanford Jail and Prison Education Project.