Taylor Shelton

Dr. Taylor Shelton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University. Broadly trained as a geographer, Dr. Shelton’s work sits at the intersection of critical human geography and GIS. His research focuses on the variety of ways that urban spaces and social inequalities are represented, reproduced and contested through maps and data.

Dr. Shelton is particularly interested in using mapping to develop alternative understandings of urban social and environmental injustices, especially as it relates to issues of housing and property ownership. But rather than only identifying where social problems - like evictions, vacant properties or speculative investments by absentee corporations - are spatially concentrated, his work strives to map the relational geographies that connect those places where inequality is experienced to the places that produce and benefit from such inequalities. More recently, he has begun applying these same techniques to the city of Atlanta and its broader metropolitan region, as chronicled on his blog, Mapping Atlanta.

Prior to joining Georgia State in 2020, Dr. Shelton held appointments at Mississippi State University, the University of Kentucky and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before that, Dr. Shelton earned BA and MA degrees in geography from the University of Kentucky and his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University.