My research is driven by a commitment to understanding how mundane infrastructures—such as housing, transportation, and digital systems—produce and reinforce unequal realities for individuals and communities. I am a broadly trained methodologist with expertise in spatial inequality, geographies of health, infrastructure, and data ethics. Drawing on tools including spatial analysis, GeoAI, ethnography, qualitative interviews, surveys, remote sensing, and cartography, my work interrogates the relationships between systemic injustices and lived experiences. Rather than simply documenting the presence of racism, sexism, classism, or ableism, I seek to uncover the consequences of these inequities on wellness and health outcomes, with the goal of informing more just policies, technologies, and communities.


Housing Security

Access to safe and affordable housing is a human right. It is also a key determinant of health and well-being. However, across the United States, it is increasingly hard to secure and keep. The goals of this project are to map the landscape of affordable housing in New Jersey in order to better understand the driving factors in housing insecurity. This work is undergirded by a desire to produce tangible policies and research outputs to assist communities.

Publications

Deitz, Shiloh, Will Payne, Eric Seymour, Kathe Newman, and Lauren Nolan. Forthcoming. “Local Landscapes of Assisted Housing: Reconciling Layered and Imprecise Administrative Data for Research Purposes.” CityScape.

Seymour, Eric, Will Payne, Kathe Newman, Shiloh Deitz, and Lauren Nolan. “The State of Rent Control in New Jersey.”

Presentations

“Beyond the Numbers: Examining Administrative Histories and Inaccuracies in U.S. Federally Assisted Housing Data.” American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Detroit, Michigan. 2025.

“Our House…In the Middle of the Street?” Urban Affairs Association Annual Meeting, Nashville, Tennessee. 2023.

“Using Administrative Data to Better Understand the State of Affordable Rental Housing.” Panel. American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado. 2023.


AI Ethics and Accessibility

Ability is impacted by human environments. Our environments both empower and hinder individual freedom to live and thrive. The goals of this project are two-fold - to reveal the geography of disability and accessibility and to create a personalizable map routing application that accounts for individual movement needs as well as speed and distance.

Publications

Deitz, Shiloh. 2023. “Outlier bias: AI classification of curb ramps, outliers, and context.” Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231203669

Deitz, Shiloh, Amy Lobben, and Arielle Alferez. 2021. “Squeaky wheels: Missing data, disability, and power in the smart city.” Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211047735


Presentations

“What Were You Thinking? Replicability and Relevance in AI Research.” Technology & Society: An Interdisciplinary Conference on AI & Finance, Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri. 2025.

“Disability GIS.” Spatial Data Science Symposium, distributed meeting. 2024.

“Cripping the Smart City.” Digital Geographies Movements and Methods Workshop, Calgary, Alberta. 2023.

“Outlier Bias.” American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado. 2023

“Disabling Environments: The Contexts and Consequences of Missing Environmental Datasets on Persons with Disabilities.” Critical Geographies Mini-Conference, University of Oregon. 2019.


Plumbing Poverty in the United States

Plumbing poverty is a conceptual and methodological tool for understanding the intersection of inequality, infrastructure, and space.

Publications

Deitz, Shiloh, and Katie Meehan. 2019. “Plumbing poverty: mapping hot spots of racial and geographic inequality in U.S. household water insecurity.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2018.1530587

Presentations

“Measuring Geographic Variability in Household Level Inequality: A Case Study in Household Plumbing Completeness.” American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C.

“Plumbing Poverty: Mapping Hot Spots of Racial and Geographic Inequality in U.S. Household Water Insecurity.” Association of Pacific Coast Geographers Annual Meeting, Reno, Nevada, 2018.

“Plumbing Poverty: Hot Spots of Geographic Inequality in U.S. Household Water Insecurity.” American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2018.

Selected Media

Florida, Richard and Claire Tran. August 2019. “Where Americans Lack Running Water, Mapped.” City Lab.

Ranganathan, Malini. 2019. “Beyond ‘Third World’ Comparisons: America’s Geography of Water, Race, and Poverty.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Sevigny, Melissa. September 2019. “Navajo, Hopi Nations Have High Rates of ‘Plumbing Poverty’.” Arizona Public Radio.