Anne Scheer - Assistant Professor

Anne Scheer, PhD

Assistant Professor

Department of Population Science and Policy  
 

Contact

217-545-8512

ascheer65@siumed.edu

Primary Responsibilities

My primary responsibilities include community-oriented research in rural areas across Central and Southern Illinois, with a particular focus on child health and wellbeing, as well as assisting in grant and manuscript writing, and general duties as assigned.

About

Born and raised in Berlin, Germany, I hold a Master’s degree in Sociocultural Anthropology and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Freie Universität Berlin. Following my MA research about a legal-political conflict concerning indigenous land rights in New Zealand, I began working towards my Ph.D. at the Graduate School of North American Studies (GSNAS, Freie Universität Berlin) in 2009, with a focus on urban education in the United States.  My doctoral research consisted of a child-focused qualitative study of school discipline at an inner-city elementary school in the Midwest. In addition to student interviews and participant observation at the school, I conducted an historical analysis of disciplinary policies at the level of the district. Moreover, I compared disciplinary policies in this inner-city district serving a high-poverty, high-minority student population to policies in suburban districts, which generally serve a wealthier and whiter student body, and found strong disparities.  I obtained my Ph.D. in 2015. Since relocating to Springfield, I have taught Sociology as adjunct faculty at several local institutions, most recently at UIS where my courses included advanced-level Sociological Theory and the Sociology of Education. My research interests include childhood studies, child poverty, urban education in the United States, educational policy, social control, and the relationships between policy design and implementation and the lived experiences of those affected by such policies.

Publications

• Scheer, A. (2017). Maneuvering the stormy waters of ethnography in an inner-city school: Reflections from the field. In I.E. Castro, M. Swauger, & B. Harger (Eds.), Researching Kids and Teens: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations, Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Volume 22. Emerald Group Publishing Ltd.
• Scheer, A. (2011). Designed to control, destined to fail? Disciplinary practices at an inner-city elementary school in the united states. Childhoods Today, 5(2). Retrieved from http://www.childhoodstoday.org/download.php?id=65