IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks :: Browsing by Author "Steensland, Brian"

Browsing by Author "Steensland, Brian"

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Black Women as the Critical Link Between Traditional Institutions and Minoritized Communities
(2024-12) Murphy, Stacia N.; Scheurich, James Joseph; Hyatt, Susan B.; Steensland, Brian; Haberski, Raymond J.
Poverty plagues many U.S. urban communities, particularly Black and brown populations. Gaps in wealth accumulation continue to widen between whites and Blacks, and neighborhoods are increasingly segregated by race and income with Black and brown populations more frequently living in concentrated poverty. Unfortunately, these factors combine to negatively influence other quality of life outcomes such as economic mobility, food security, health disparities and medical costs, infant and maternal health, life spans, education, discriminatory policing practices, and environmental health issues, factors that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, development continues to play an integral role in the way that urban cities attempt to solve their problems. In Indianapolis, the primary practitioners of urban development are housed within several key intuitions, and ultimately, typically held by white men or women, who make economic decisions that shape the lives of Indianapolis residents. Unfortunately, these institutions are often disconnected from populations at the margins and, thus, community engagement is the mechanism through which institutions attempt to connect with these communities. Consequently, it is common to see individuals who look like the populations that institutions want to serve in these positions. These individuals can be thought of as bridges between these communities and the institutions in which they work. Utilizing Black Feminist Thought (BFT) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study explores the lived experiences, knowledges, and practices associated with the role of bridge between institutions and community with a focus solely on Black women in these roles. Through textual analysis of transcribed interviews based in grounded theory with some mix of deductive and inductive coding, this study will help us better understand local perspectives about community engagement specifically and urban development more generally.
Building Civic Infrastructure Organizations: The Lilly Endowment's Experiment to Grow Community Foundations
(2019-05) Wang, Xiaoyun; Benjamin, Lehn; Burlingame, Dwight; Guo, Chao; Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark; Steensland, Brian
In the past 50 years, we have seen significant public and philanthropic investment in building civil society in countries around the globe. This includes initiating community foundations to support the development of vibrant communities and civic life. Yet we have little knowledge about why some initiatives bear fruit and others fail to do so. More specifically, why some community foundations initiated by institutional funders are able to garner local giving necessary to sustain themselves and others are not. This dissertation contributes to our knowledge about such initiatives by researching the Lilly Endowment’s GIFT Initiative (Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow), a project providing incentives to start nearly 60 new community foundations and revive 17 existing community foundations in Indiana since 1990. I employed mixed methods and three sources of data: historical archives, statistics of community foundations’ financial information and community demographics, and case studies of four community foundations. First, I found two existing explanations offered in the literature did not account for the lack of local support for the community foundations I studied. More specifically, I found that high level of income and wealth does not necessarily lead to high level of giving to community foundations and the lack of community identity is not the primary reason explaining community foundations’ struggles in attracting local donations. Rather the study shows that social capital is crucial for garnering local giving through the mechanism of facilitating information sharing. Second, I examined the long-term effects of matching grants, a key strategy used by Lilly Endowment to leverage local giving. I found that long-term provision of matching grants might reduce organizations’ incentives to seek funding sources on their own. My dissertation lends further insight into the sustainability of civic infrastructure organizations, a popular institutional model for building local civil society even today.
Christian Personalism and Human Rights Prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Philosophical and Theological Exploration
(2024-12) Williams, Andrew Lloyd; King, David P.; Badertscher, Katherine; Haberski, Raymond J.; Steensland, Brian
The high tide of modern transnational institution-building occurred in the immediate aftermath of two profound crises: the Great Depression and World War II. No document better captures the aspirations for a post-war era of greater human welfare than the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR elevated the rights of individual humans above the doctrine of state-sovereignty and embodied the burgeoning view that states have a responsibility to secure the welfare and rights of all persons. A “new” school of human rights historiography has shown that Christian personalists were among the few advocates of “human rights” in this period. Moreover, Jacques Maritain and Charles Malik, prominent Christian personalists, were directly involved in United Nations efforts to codify universal human rights. Yet new-school historiography has over-corrected for “classical” historiography’s penchant to rely heavily on arcane philosophical and theological developments dating centuries and even millennia into the past. New-school historiography deracinates Christian personalism form its nineteenth century forebearers: philosophical personalism, phenomenology, existentialism, and neo-classicism. It also underplays the orthogonal character of a movement that aspired to create a third way between established polarities. The very term “personalism” connotes a middle position between individualism and collectivism: individual human beings have inviolable dignity and are inherently relational. As such, the current picture of the advent of human rights discourse in the mid-twentieth century is incomplete. By connecting Christian personalism to its nineteenth-century philosophical roots and contextualizing its views of the relationship between the individual and the state in the crisis milieu of the transwar era, I fill an important gap in the history of “human rights” discourse in the buildup to the UDHR.
"Death to the World" and the Aesthetics of Conspiracy
(2024-12) Saler, Robert Cady; Goff, Philip; Steensland, Brian; Haberski, Ray; Whitehead, Andrew
This study examines the small but influential "Death to the World" movement within U.S. Eastern Orthodoxy. The study offers the first comprehensive history of the movement from its origins into the present, and it also demonstrates how key affective components of the movement's appeal (asceticism, punk rock aesthetics, etc.) have been adapted into participation in conspiracy theorizing. The dissertation draws on contemporary conspiracy theory scholarship, religious studies, and sociology to make the case that "Death to the World" stands as a helpful case study for how the affective dimensions that make a movement successful also open it up to conspiracy theory participation.
Evangelicals, Then and Now: Plausibility, Boundaries, and American Evangelicalism as Ethnicity
(Wiley, 2019-12) Steensland, Brian; Sociology, School of Liberal Arts
Faith-Based Social Entrepreneurial Orientation: A Case of Evangelicals
(2021-10) Clark, Richard S.; Craig, David M.; King, David; Steensland, Brian; Badertscher, Katherine; Guo, Chao
The focus of this study is the experiences of eight individual evangelical social entrepreneurs within their congregations. What type of legitimacy do they seek and/or receive for? Do they sense any pressure to conform/motivations to act relative to their congregation’s values/identity? Do these relationships encourage or discourage their entrepreneurial orientation/intensity and in what ways? The primary research question is “how does embeddedness in an evangelical faith community affect the experiences and expression of social entrepreneurial orientation and intensity for evangelical faith-based social entrepreneurs, if at all?” The study identifies three types of congregations in terms of their relationship to the social entrepreneurs in their communities. Two are entrepreneurial, two others are supportive, four are non-supporting. Three areas of tension emerged that highlighted the experiences of the entrepreneurs within their communities of faith in different ways and to various degrees. The first is a tension between the sacred and secular, which is a question about whether entrepreneurism is itself a sacred calling and whether sacred activities and profit motives can mix. The second tension is between differing visions of what it means to do good. This is fundamentally about diagnosing the problem efforts at doing good are attempting to ameliorate. The entrepreneurs in this study generally agree that the problem is both personal and societal and requires a holistic transformational approach to discipleship and social entrepreneurship. The final tension is between institutionalism vs. movements. Movements tend to be somewhat chaotic and allow freedom for adherents to take risks and test ideas whereas institutions tend to restrict and control in the interest of preserving focus on mission. A key finding is that regardless of the posture of the various churches, the entrepreneurs in every circumstance maintained their social entrepreneurial orientation. If they could not find support for their entrepreneurial efforts within their existing community of faith they may or may not continue to maintain the same level of commitment to that community while seeking support elsewhere, but in all cases, their level of entrepreneurism remained high.
Get involved : stories of the Caribbean postcolonial black middle class and the development of civil society
(2018-03-07) Williams-Pulfer, Kim N.; Stanfield II., John H.; Springer, Jennifer Thorington; Benjamin, Lehn; Steensland, Brian
The main research question of this project is: How do the narratives of Caribbean black middle class civil society within the bounds of the “post-postcolonial” state, explain the evolving yet current environment of local and postcolonial civil society development? Using the Bahamas as a case, this project explores the historical, political, cultural, and social conditions that supported the development of civil society within the context of a postcolonial society. Furthermore, an investigation via in-depth interviews, participation observation, archival, and contemporary document analysis contextualizes the present-day work of civil society leaders in the Bahamas. Methodologically, the project employs narrative analysis to uncover the perspectives, voices, and practices of black middle-class Bahamian civil society offering an unfolding, dynamic, and nuanced approach for understanding the historical legacies and contemporary structure of local civil society and philanthropy. The study focuses on three primary forms of narratives. These include the narratives of the past (historical), the narratives of expressive and aesthetic cultural practices, and the narratives of lived experience. The project locates that the development of civil society is linked to historical and cultural forces. The findings show that that the narratives of history, social, and artistic development foregrounds a hybrid model of civil society development drawn from the experience of slavery, colonialism, decolonization, as well as the emerging structures related to economic and political globalization. Furthermore, observed through resilience narratives, local civil society leaders negotiate the boundaries of hybridity in their understanding of their personal, social, and professional identities as well as the way in which they engage government, the public, as well as local and international funders.
Identity reconciliation and religious agency in gay and lesbian Episcopal clergy
(2018-01) Hemphill, Amy L.; Steensland, Brian
The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in the United States won a significant civil rights battle when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage in 2015, and a majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage and accept homosexuality (PewResearch 2016a). However, notable conflict between the LBGT community and individuals and organized religion remains, as evidenced by the United Methodist Church’s ruling in April 2017 that the recent consecration of a lesbian bishop violated church law. According to UMC doctrine, homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching” (Goodstein 2017). The choice to continue participating in religious organizations whose formal policies, structures, and doctrines challenge the overlapping identities of “Christian” and lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender is one that merits sociological inquiry. For some non-heterosexual Christians, a third identity enters the picture – that of ordained clergy. This third identity intensifies the salience of the first two; a Christian clergy person follows their religious beliefs and practices to a full-time vocation, and the increased scrutiny and expectations of clergy can shine an uncomfortable spotlight on issues of sexuality. To examine the “incompatibility” between homosexuality and Christianity, this study investigates the integration of homosexual and Christian identities at the micro level, among gay and lesbian Episcopal clergy. While such persons possess a gay or lesbian sexual identity, they also embody the institutional church as ordained clergy. Examining their processes of integrating homosexual and Christian identities provides a deeper understanding of the larger social conflict between homosexuality and Christianity; and because of their unique position vis a vis religion and sexuality, the experiences of gay and lesbian clergy can also reveal important information about the strategies and practices utilized by individuals as they attempt to transform religious institutions. This thesis asks how gay and lesbian Episcopal clergy reconcile and maintain their religious and sexual identities, and what strategies of religious agency they demonstrate as they work for a more just and inclusive church.
A Latent Class Analysis of Vaping, Substance Use and Asthma Among U.S. High School Students: Results from the Center for Disease Control's Youth Risk Behavior Survey
(2021-07) Zervos, Andrew Peter; Hensel, Devon J.; Foote, Carrie E.; Steensland, Brian
Rates of vaping among high school students have increased significantly over the past decade. Prior research has found significant associations between youth vaping and substance use. However, little is known about how vaping is associated with various patterns of polysubstance use and asthma in youth. We aimed to identify how youth are best categorized into classes based on co-occurring vaping and polysubstance use behaviors, how these classes are associated with youth background and demographic characteristics, and if these classes significantly predict asthma outcomes. Our sample consisted of nationally representative data from the 2017 and 2019 waves of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (N = 28,442). We utilized Latent Class Analysis, multinomial logistic regression analyses, and binary logistic regression analyses to examine relationships between youth vaping, polysubstance use, and asthma. Three latent classes of substance use were identified: Polysubstance Users, Lifetime Alcohol and Vape Users, and Abstainers. Age, gender, grade and race were all significantly associated with odds of membership in the Polysubstance Users class, compared to the Abstainers class. Sexual identity was not associated with class membership. Membership in the Polysubstance Users class was significantly associated with higher odds of asthma, as compared to membership in the other two classes. These findings indicate that recent vaping is associated with high probabilities of recent polysubstance use. They also suggest that youth with high probabilities of vaping and polysubstance use are at significantly high risk for asthma compared to other classes vi of youth users and non-users. We recommend that future youth intervention strategies be tailored differently toward different classes of substance use and vaping. Future research should examine how the classes of vaping and substance use that we identify emerge in youth and what social factors (e.g., peer behavior, parental connectedness, etc.) influence their development.
Social Entrepreneurship Among Protestant American Congregations: The Role, Theology, Motivations, and Experiences of Lay and Clergy Leaders
(2019-08) Austin, Thad Stephen; King, David; Tempel, Eugene R.; Steensland, Brian; Burlingame, Dwight F.
This qualitative dissertation contributes to the nascent literature on the study of social enterprise in American congregations through an examination of the role, theology, motivations, and experiences of Protestant Christian social entrepreneurs who are pursuing (or have pursued) social entrepreneurship in the congregational setting. These religious leaders engage the free market by establishing social ventures such as hotels, thrift stores, community development corporations, restaurants, retail outlets, publishing companies, and landscaping businesses among others. Drawing on forty-four in-depth, semi-structured interviews with lay and clergy leaders representing a diverse sample of twenty-six American congregations from four Protestant traditions and six geographic regions, this dissertation asks: Who are these congregational social entrepreneurs (their role and their theology)? Why do they engage in congregational social entrepreneurship (motivations)? And how do they go about establishing social ventures (experiences)? This study provides scholars and practitioners insights into the identity, motivations, and experiences of American religious leaders who are pioneering an emerging form of religious practice that blurs the distinction between the pastor and parishioner, the sacred and secular, and the instrumental and expressive. This dissertation offers contributions to both theory and practice. Instead of conceptualizing “social entrepreneurship” and “values and faith” as separate categories (as in prior research), this dissertation introduces a new theoretical paradigm with an intersecting model of instrumental and expressive rationales for nonprofit institutions. Transcending otherwise clearly defined boundaries, the study’s findings speak to the flexibility of social entrepreneurship to conform to the values of its leadership and the pervasive and permeating reach of faith within the context of human endeavor. Additionally, this research offers a constructive understanding of the role, theological tenets, and practical experiences of lay and clergy leaders.

Browsing by Author "Steensland, Brian"

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