Immigration, integration, and community reception
Current research on immigration and community studies the needs of immigrant, refugee, and English-language learners in rural communities. For this work, I am collaborating with Bismarck Global Neighbors, a local nonprofit offering cultural mentoring and connection, to produce a report on the needs, opportunities, and challenges these new arrivals face.
My doctoral work examined how bodily discipline in immigrant Latino communities contributes to shared cultural logics regarding how groups understand their presence and purpose in their host country. Through interviews and observations, I sought to understand how immigrant groups navigated cross-cultural experiences and variance in salient identities. Comparing two church communities, I found that as the first- and second-generation Latino immigrants become embedded in communities that shape their understanding of their immigrant experience, their bodily practice is also shaped in ways that impact processes of acculturation present in the communities. I am currently reshaping this dissertation as a book manuscript and am preparing stand alone articles as well.
My work has connected me with nationwide communities of scholars on the topics of immigration, religion, and democracy.
Beginning in 2021, I joined PRRI’s Religion and Renewing Democracy Initiative as a Public Fellow in the area of immigration and migration studies. The initiative, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seeks to encourage collaboration and public scholarship at the intersection of religion, culture, and politics.
From 2014-2017 I was a fellow with the Latino Protestant Congregations Study, funded by the Lilly Endowment. The LPC project brought together fellows to examine and illuminate the variety and complexity of Latino Protestant congregations and their worship practices in the United States through a qualitative approach.
Poverty alleviation efforts in local communities
Prosper Springfield is a collective impact initiative model. By partnering with a number of different local organizations aimed at improving the lives of the city’s inhabitants, Prosper Springfield pools, strengthens, and further motivates the work of those dedicated to enhancing local outcomes in the areas of education, health, housing, employment, and financial security. My role was as a consultant on the measurement items that the various organizations use to assess impact and writing reports.
Individualism, commitment, gender, and authority in religious settings
With Mary Ellen Konieczny, we researched religious marriage cultures. Out of this we published two peer-reviewed articles. In “Individualism and Marriage: Ideal Types for Making Sense of the Relationship between Self and Sacrifice”, (Qualitative Sociology 2017) for which I was first author, we provide theoretically-grounded reconceptualizations of the intertwining relationship between commitment and individualism in local marriages. While macro data reveal trends of individualistic orientations to relationships in Western countries, micro-level data retain diversity in how commitment and individualism are related to one another.
In “The Continuance of Gender Culture Amid Change in Mexican-American immigrant Catholic Contexts” (Journal of Qualitative Sociology 2019), we showed how Mexican-American cultural norms around gender shaped ideas of male religious authority and ideals of marriage in a Catholic immigrant context.