Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change Academic Research Fellow Anzhelika (Angela) Antipova recently had an article accepted in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities. Titled “Unemployment in Socially Disadvantaged communities in Tennessee, US, during the COVID-19,” Dr. Antipova and her co-author Ehsan Momeni studied the impact of unemployment outcomes of the socially disadvantage during the ongoing health crisis. In the abstract, they write in part:

Urban studies related to previous pandemics and impacts on cities focused on vulnerable categories including poor and marginalized groups. We continue this tradition and analyze unemployment outcomes in a context of a multi-dimensional social disadvantage that is unfolding during the ongoing public health crisis. For this, we first propose an approach to identify communities by social disadvantage status captured by several key metrics. Second, we apply this methodology in the study of the effect of social disadvantage on unemployment during the COVID-19 and measure the COVID-19-related economic impact using the most recent data on unemployment.

Dr. Antopova is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Memphis, where she teaches quantitative methods, spatial statistics, transportation planning, urban geography, economic geography, and cultural geography in the Department of Earth Sciences. She is interested in understanding spatial processes in urban environments including various aspects of urban, health, and transportation issues focusing on race, life quality, and social injustice problems in Shelby County, Tennessee. She addresses disparities in maternal health, travel behavior, employment patterns, and other life aspects, which are preventable and avoidable, focusing on vulnerable populations including minorities and lower-income workers.