Vanessa Massaro, Geography

While the field of geography is often linked to the study of earth's physical systems — climate, landforms, topographies — it is equally concerned with understanding how human institutions shape daily life across space and time. For Vanessa Massaro, geography, that means examining how economic, social and political consequences are spatially distributed across different communities.

"As a geographer, I was interested in these uneven geographies of unemployment, finance and wealth disparity," says Massaro, who earned her master’s in geography at the University of Arizona before completing her doctoral degree at the Pennsylvania State University. Her early research delved into the field of urban economics. Specifically, she studies geographies of home foreclosures in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. After returning to Pennsylvania, her attention shifted toward Philadelphia and the relationship between policing and economic stability across different neighborhoods. 

"When I came to Bucknell in 2014, I really liked that I'd be working at a liberal arts institution," says Massaro, whose early research with students involved conducting household surveys to determine how Philadelphia neighborhoods with high incarceration rates were socially and economically impacted. Locally, she began investigating how the coal region's economy was shaped by people who worked in prisons. "I would say a central throughline of my research has always been asking how mass incarceration impacts specific communities," she says.

The close-knit, liberal arts environment at Bucknell encouraged multidisciplinary collaboration, and Massaro connected with professors across different departments. "I got involved with Darakhshan Mir, computer science, and Nathan Ryan, mathematics, looking at the use of risk assessment algorithms to lower prison populations," she says.

Originally, Massaro's focus was on parole and parole risk assessment. However, by working directly with justice-impacted populations to formulate research questions, she and her fellow faculty members began examining the processes that govern prison intake.

"At intake, prisoners do all these tests, and then the prison uses this algorithm that basically assigns them a security level and determines which prison they're going to go to," says Massaro, who, along with her fellow researchers and Swarup Dhar '22, published a paper about carceral algorithms and their power to shape the lived experiences of prisoners. "And there are a number of problems with that, one of them being that the algorithm is a black box, so we've been trying to better understand how it makes certain calculations."

While Massaro's research is ongoing, she's arrived at one pivotal conclusion that animates her approach to academic inquiry. "What prison you're in really matters," she says. "Different prisons have different policies and programming, and this algorithm determines what kind of programming you're eligible for, which itself impacts not only your experience in prison but your life after it."

Along with collaborating with faculty and students to illuminate the operational mysteries at the heart of the prison intake process, Massaro also works closely with justice-impacted people throughout the region. "I'll say the other throughline of my research has been trying to center the experiences of people who are impacted by the system," she says. "I think they know the most about it and they understand it the best."

Even though Massaro's background is in geography, she finds that this kind of research lends itself well to a variety of disciplines. "I think one of the reasons I work with so many students from computer science and engineering is that they not only want to become better at programming, but they want to do work that feels meaningful," says Massaro. "That's why a project like this is so attractive — it reveals the concrete impacts that technology and systems have on human lives."