A selection of my academic publications

Investigating Cancer Inequalities in Urbanizing Texas with Plausible Reasoning
The Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2024) doi:10.1080/24694452.2024.2425807

This article examines changes in the social geography of colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence following the spread of improved preventive technology circa 2003, namely screening colonoscopy. It adopts a realist approach to social science methodology, and a political-economy of health perspective on disease prevention. View pdf

Spatial Uncertainty and Probability
with co-author Yongwan Chun. Oxford Handbook for the Spatial Humanities (forthcoming)

This chapter introduces basic concepts from the frequency-based theory and from the rival, epistemological tradition of probability theory. We sketch out some connections between probability theory and ongoing discussions of methodology in the humanities, singling out Franco Moretti’s ‘operationalist’ method of literary analysis for constructive critique. The chapter then provides a theoretically-grounded orientation to spatial data analysis, including exploratory analysis, spatial regression, and geographical theories of spatial structuring or relational space. To illustrate, we re-analyze state prison sentencing data from a previously published study of Florida’s convict leasing program.

Plausible Reasoning and Spatial-Statistical Theory: A Critique of Recent Writings on ‘Spatial Confounding’.
Geographical Analysis (2024) https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12408 (open access)

Statistical research on correlation with spatial data dates at least to Student’s (W. S. Gosset’s) 1914 paper on “the elimination of spurious correlation due to position in time and space.” Since 1968, much of this work has been organized around the concept of spatial autocorrelation (SA). A growing statistical literature is now organized around the concept of “spatial confounding” (SC) but is estranged from, and often at odds with, the SA literature and its history. The SC literature is producing new, sometimes flawed, statistical techniques such as Restricted Spatial Regression (RSR). This article brings the SC literature into conversation with the SA literature and provides a theoretically grounded review of the history of research on correlation with spatial data, explaining some of its implications for the the SC literature. The article builds upon principles of plausible inference to synthesize a guiding theoretical thread that runs throughout the SA literature. This leads to a concise theoretical critique of RSR and a clarification of the logic behind standard spatial-statistical models.

The Making of Florida’s ‘Criminal Class’: Race, Modernity, and the Convict Leasing Program, 1877-1919
Florida Historical Quarterly (2019)

Under the State of Florida’s convict leasing program (1877-1919) approximately 14,000 Floridians and visitors served sentences of hard labor, working for private interests like phosphate mines and lumber companies. This article draws on over four decades of reports on the prison system by its administrators in the Florida Department of Agriculture, geographic sentencing data, data on prisoner characteristics, minutes from the Board of Pardons, and additional materials held in the Convict Lease Subject Files in the Florida State Archives. The study engages with a number of questions revolving around the inter-connected themes of forced labor, industrial interests, violence, disability, and racial ideology. PDF (pre-print with images); PDF (the FHQ article)

Florida Historical Quarterly cover