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• The University of Chicago Center for Race, Politics, and Culture
• Curriculum Vitae
• vparks@uchicago.edu
  (773).702.1132
  

 Virginia Parks, Ph. D.

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Biography

Virginia Parks is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Service Administration. Her fields of special interest include urban geography, urban labor markets, immigration, racial and gender inequality, residential segregation, and community organizing and development. She teaches courses at SSA in policy formulation and implementation and in community organizing and development.

In her research, Professor Parks analyzes the patterns and ramifications of spatial inequality, particularly as they manifest in urban environments at the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender. Her primary interest is in how space and place bring about and mediate labor market outcomes, such as unemployment and low-wage work, for immigrants, native-born minorities, and women.  A central concern informing Professor Parks's research and teaching is how local communities can respond to these patterns of inequality through various organizing and development efforts.

Professor Parks is a 2008-09 Russell Sage Visiting Scholar.  Her project at the Russell Sage Foundation, with Dorian Warren (Columbia University), examines local political responses by communities of color to economic inequality and the plight of low-wage work through a comparative case study of two anti-Wal-Mart campaigns: a campaign in Chicago, IL, that led to the passage and subsequent mayoral veto of a "Big Box Living Wage Ordinance" aimed explicitly at Wal-Mart and the low-wage retail industry in 2006 and the zoning defeat of Wal-Mart in Inglewood/Los Angeles, CA, in 2004.  These cases reveal how, when, and with what success ordinary people--local residents and grassroots political actors--can exercise their political voice to influence urban economic development and the new Wal-Mart economy of low-wage work.

Professor Parks received her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before her life as an academic, Professor Parks worked as a community organizer.

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• Parks, V. (accepted for publication). “The uneven geography of racial and ethnic wage inequality: Specifying local labor market effects.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers.
• Parks, V. (accepted for publication).  “Revisiting shibboleths of race and urban economy: Black employment in manufacturing and the public sector compared, Chicago 1950-2000.”  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
• Wright, R., Ellis, M., and Parks, V. (accepted for publication). “Immigrant niches and the intrametropolitan spatial division of labour.”  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
• Parks, V. 2010. “Gendering job competition: Immigration and African American employment in Chicago, 1990-2000.”  Urban Geography 31(1): 59-89.
• Parks, V. and Warren, D. 2009.  “The politics and practice of economic justice:  Community benefits agreements as tactic of the new accountable development movement.”  Journal of Community Practice 17(1&2): 88-106.
• Sites, W., Chaskin, R., and Parks, V. 2007.  “Reframing community practice for the 21^st century: Multiple traditions, multiple challenges.”  Journal of Urban Affairs 29 (5): 519-541.
• Ellis, M., Wright, R., and Parks, V. 2007. “Geography and the immigrant division of labor.” Economic Geography 83(3): 255-281.
• Parks, V. 2006.  “Race, immigration, and the global city:  Lessons from Chicago’s hotel housekeepers” in Chicago’s Geographies: Metropolis for the 21^st Century, ed. by Richard P. Greene, Mark J. Bouman, and Dennis Grammenos.  Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, pp. 129-142.
• Ellis, M., Wright, R., and Parks, V. 2006.  “The immigrant household and spatial assimilation: Partnership, nativity, and neighborhood location.” Urban Geography 27(1): 1-19.
• Parks, V. 2005.  The Geography of Immigrant Labor Markets: Space, Networks, and Gender.  New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC.
• Wright, W., Ellis, M., and Parks,. V. 2005.  “Re-placing whiteness in spatial assimilation research.”  City & Community 4(2): 111-135.
• Parks, V. 2004. “Access to work: The effects of spatial and social accessibility on unemployment for native-born black and immigrant women in Los Angeles.”  Economic Geography 80(2): 141-172.
• Parks, V. 2004.  “The gendered connection between ethnic residential and labor-market segregation in Los Angeles.” Urban Geography 25(7): 589-630.
• Ellis, M., Wright, R., and Parks, V. 2004.  “Work together, live apart?  Geographies of racial and ethnic segregation at home and at work,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(3): 620-637.