Elvin Wyly

He studies the relations between market processes and state policy in producing and reinforcing urban social inequalities. His approach blends elements of critical social theory, legal and policy analysis, and multivariate quantitative methods designed to engage state and corporate institutions on their own terrain, with their own data. Current and recent research projects focus on class, racial, and gender discrimination in housing finance in the U.S. urban system; the transformation and financialization of implicit and explicit housing subsidies; the role of transnational financial circuits in the reconfiguration of segregation, displacement, and gentrification; historical and contemporary conflicts between positivist and nonpositivist modes of geographical knowledge production; the quantitative algorithmic evolution of competitive dynamics among and within educational institutions; housing affordability and the evolution of suburban development in Canadian and U.S. cities; the implications of mass social networking for urban and geographical theory; and the cybernetic political epistemologies of resurgent White nationalist racism in Trump’s America.