Anna Rhodes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rice University. Her research examines household residential decision-making.
Her new book Soaking the Middle Class: Suburban Inequality and Recovery from Disaster published by the Russell Sage Foundation examines the residential decisions of middle-class households who were displaced during Hurricane Harvey. Through longitudinal interviews and community observations this study examines how disasters increase economic vulnerability and inequality among households in a middle-class community.
Another area of research combines the sociology of education and urban sociology to investigate the dynamic relationship between residential and educational inequality. She examines the intersection of families’ school and residential choices, exploring the role of housing, neighborhood, and school contexts on children’s educational opportunities and outcomes. Her ongoing projects examine how poor families sort into neighborhoods and schools across metropolitan areas, and the social processes through which children are influenced by their residential and educational contexts. She is currently working on a study that examines how low-income Black families, moving with a housing mobility program from an urban center to the surrounding suburban metropolitan area, navigate the process of adjusting to different school contexts, and the effect of this transition on students’ academic outcomes.
Dr. Rhodes has recently published work in the American Educational Research Journal, Social Forces, Social Problems, Urban Education, Evaluation Review, and in the edited volume “Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools.”
