Colloquia
Title: “The Color of Activity Space in U.S. Metro Areas”
Abstract: Activity spaces are often segregated, leading visitors to be isolated from different social groups. Relying on large-scale mobile phone data tracking mobility flows from communities to places, this talk shows how we can quantify activity space racial segregation across U.S. metropolitan areas by analyzing the racial composition of a place's monthly visitors. The findings reveal substantial variation in activity space segregation across different geographic regions, types of places, and home communities. By linking contemporary activity space segregation with historical exclusionary practices (HEPs) such as redlining and zoning, this talk argues that activity space segregation is a racialized process that systematically sorts people into different spaces during their routine activities. These HEPs have reshaped racial geography and the spatial distribution of organizational and social resources, thereby influencing patterns of foot traffics.
Bio
Dr. Yongjun Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, the AI Innovation Institute, and the Center for Changing Systems of Power.
As a computational social scientist, Dr. Zhang leverages large-scale data, natural language processing, and computer vision to investigate social, political, and organizational behavior, focusing on topics such as racial segregation, political polarization, and organizational inequality.
His research has been published in leading journals, including American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Scientific Reports, and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. He is also the co-editor of Computational Social Science: Applications in China Studies and serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Nature Scientific Data, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Socius, Social Science Computer Review, and The Sociological Quarterly.