Browsing by Author "Ecklund, Elaine H"

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    Encounters with Outsiders: An Examination of White Habitus in a Gang Intervention Site
    (2015-04-17) Garcia, Adriana Lizette; Ecklund, Elaine H; Emerson, Michael O; Chavez, Sergio
    Although law enforcement agencies have utilized incarceration as a means of incapacitation, mass incarceration has not made great strides in impeding gang entry. In response, religious and nonprofit organizations have created community programs and assessment-based approaches to gang intervention and prevention. Few studies have examined the various ways volunteers implement such interventions to a contemporary social problem. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research (2012-2014) as well as 27 semi-structured interviews, this thesis examines how affluent, white mainline Protestant volunteers construct and participate in gang intervention work. I argue that the gang intervention volunteers possess a “white habitus” which inhibits their encounters with gang-affiliated youth. This white habitus, described as predispositions which condition whites’ racial tastes and views on racial matters, informs their perceptions about gang culture in a way that either reproduces whiteness or leads to an unsuccessful relationship between mentor and mentee. Instead, volunteers create “reaffirmed outsiders”, as they reapply stereotypes and generalizations and offer limited perspective on gang intervention solutions. These results provide a more nuanced account of gang intervention implementation and just as importantly, of race and its pernicious effects on the everyday efforts of well-intentioned people and programs.
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    How Chinese Americans Use Religion to Frame Racial Injustice: From #BlackLivesMatter to #StopAsianHate
    (2022-04-19) Mabute-Louie, Bianca H; Ecklund, Elaine H
    This thesis examines how religion connects to the racial attitudes of Chinese American evangelical Christians. With the growing prominence of evangelicalism among Chinese Americans, many of whom are immigrants and attend ethnic churches, there is a gap in understanding how immigrant and ethnic church contexts shape racial attitudes. Utilizing a multilingual and multigenerational Chinese evangelical Christian church as the site of study, this project interrogates how the increasing proportion of Chinese American evangelicals use religion to explain racial injustice and respond to racial justice movements. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 30 first- and second-generation Chinese American evangelicals from First Chinese Church of Houston (FCCH) conducted between August 2021 through February 2022, I find that Chinese American evangelicals combine dominant evangelical religious frames on race with distinct cultural values, transnational contexts, and experiences of racial discrimination to explain and respond to racial injustice through two major approaches: an anti-structural Confucian approach and a transnational structural approach. These approaches are not binary categories, but represent the dominant religio-cultural toolkits that respondents draw upon to explain and respond to racial injustice. At times, Chinese American evangelicals employ mixed explanatory modes from both approaches. The findings reveal the ongoing salience of race, ethnicity, and the immigrant ethnic church in shaping the racial attitudes of first- and second-generation Chinese American evangelicals. This project bridges the literature on race and immigration, while moving the scholarship on race and religion beyond the Black and White binary.
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    Practicing Minority Religion: Interrogating the Role of Race, National Belonging, and Gender Among Sikhs in the US and England
    (2020-04-24) Khalsa, Simranjit; Ecklund, Elaine H
    Defying the expectations of scholarship predicting that religion will continue to decline, religion remains an influential force that shapes the lives of everyday people. Religious beliefs and communities provide people with cultural tools to understand the world around them, shape their views and beliefs about other aspects of the social world, and provide community members access to resources. We have little understanding, however, of how status as a religious minority shapes the lives of practitioners and their interactions with people outside of their faith tradition. I turn my attention to this subject by asking how having a minority religious identity is linked to race, national belonging, and constructions of gender. I examine these questions through the Sikh case in the US and England. Sikhs are a religious minority in every nation in which they are present, making them an excellent case to examine these questions. Further, in the US and England they are a particularly visible and distinctive religious minority, and both countries have distinct state relationships to religion, distinct relationships to India, and shared but unique experiences with radical terrorism claiming affiliation with Islam. I draw on 11 months of participant observation with two communities in two national contexts, analyzing data from 79 qualitative interviews to better understand the experience of practicing a minority religion. I find that boundary work is central to the experience of practicing Sikhism for my respondents, shaping their religious practice, the way they go about their lives, and their interactions with non-Sikhs. Further, I find that race, national belonging, and constructions of gender are tightly bound up with the way Sikhs understand their own identity, how they situate themselves in relation to other groups, and how they are perceived by non-Sikhs. Taken together, this research contributes necessary information to understand the experiences of practitioners of minority religions in contexts that are becoming increasingly religiously diverse.