MARK ELLIS

 

Professor

 

Department of Geography and

Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

University of Washington

Seattle, WA 98195

 

Telephone: 206.616.6207

Fax: 206.543.3313

 

email: ellism@u.washington.edu

Education

 

Ph.D. Geography (1988), Indiana University.

 

M.A. Geography (1984), Indiana University.

 

BSc. Geography (1981), Bedford College, University of London.

Research Interests

My interests are in immigration, “race”, ethnicity, and labor markets in the United States.  I am working on three projects:

Immigrant settlement patterns and the redistribution of the US-born population. Through this research I hope to answer the following two questions: Is the US "demographically balkanizing" or do current immigrant settlement trends portend other more likely regional demographic futures? And what are the socio-political implications for the United States of the emergence of regions that are increasingly dominated by immigrants of non-European ancestry?  For this project I have recently published a paper exploring the history of racial population projections in the US and critiquing their current use – see What Future for Whites? (International Journal of Population Geography, 2001, 7: 111-136). Earlier work written with Richard Wright investigates the linkages between immigration and internal migration, the use of the balkanization metaphor in US immigration discourse, and the idea of a “territorial politics of immigration”.  More recent work with Jamie Goodwin-White examines whether immigrants, and the 1.5 generation in particular, are likely to remain in traditional areas of immigration: 1.5 Generation Internal Migration in the United States: Dispersion from States of Immigration? Click on research papers for links to citations and abstracts of other papers.  

The Ethnic Division of Labor in Los Angeles and New York. I am investigating how existing native and immigrant employment concentrations (industrial, occupational and spatial) grow or decline-and how new ones emerge-in response to two intersecting forces: shifts in regional industrial/occupational structure and the continued in-migration of new workers of diverse ethno-racial backgrounds. An NSF project (with Richard Wright) titled Residential Segregation and the Spatial Division of Labor of Immigrants in Los Angeles investigated these issues using a special file of 1990 census data that includes information on the census tract of work and residence and other characteristics of employment for individual workers.  There are three papers available from this project: Work Together, Live Apart?  Geographies of Racial and Ethnic Segregation at home and at Work  (Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2004, 94: 620-637),  Re-placing Whiteness in Spatial Assimilation Research (City and Community, 2005: 4: 111-136), and The Immigrant Household and Spatial Assimilation: Partnership, Nativity and Neighborhood Location (Forthcoming in Urban Geography) .

Interracial Partnering and Multiraciality.  I am working with Steven Holloway and Richard Wright on a Russell Sage and NSF funded project on mixed-race households.  We are especially interested in three issues: the residential location of mixed-race couples/households relative to same-race households, the effect of mixed-race households on measures of residential segregation, and the impact of neighborhood ethnic/racial composition on the identity of children born to interracial couples.  There are three completed papers from this project:   Crossing racial lines: geographies of mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States (Progress in Human Geography, 2003, Vol 27: 457-474),  Partnering “Out” and Fitting In: Residential Segregation and the Neighborhood Contexts of Mixed-Race Households (Population, Space and Place, 2005, 11: 299-324), and Places of Possibility: Where Mixed-Race Couples Meet (Progress in Human Geography, 2005, 29, 700-717).

 

Links

 

Courses  Research  Immigrants in Washington State