This exploratory study examines the motivations and goals of relocators, Christian Community Development Association members who intentionally relocate to low-income urban neighborhoods for the purpose of community partnership. The purpose of this project is twofold: first, I seek to describe and explore the motivations, goals, and experiences of relocators, a population unknown to most scholars; and second, I seek to consider these findings from an explicitly critical perspective. Thus, I orient my study within feminist antiracism, employing Romanâs (1997) fantasies of redemptive identification as my theoretical framework, which suggests that whites tend to collapse differences among racial groups in an attempt to create (false) sameness among them, often resulting in the appropriation of othersâ experiences, an implicit norming, a redemptive and heroic positioning, and an avoidance of systemic complicity. I collected qualitative data in 2010 from a snowball sample of 10 participants in Portland, Milwaukee, and Chicago via in-depth, semi-structured interviewing. Findings revealed that: (1) participants were primarily motivated by a religious conviction to personally respond to issues of poverty and injustice; (2) participants sought to belong in the neighborhood through shared experiences and personal relationships; and (3), participants described relocations as both a risk and a benefit. Moreover, critical analysis of these themes further suggests that relocators tended to: (1) explicitly resist a redemptive role while implicitly assuming a modeling position; (2) seek sameness through geographic proximity with limited attention to issues of power and difference; and (3) focus on individual-level interventions with virtually no references to macro-level change.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-03242017-080814 |
| Date | 31 March 2017 |
| Creators | Eccleston, Sara Michelle Perisho |
| Contributors | Douglas D. Perkins, Sara Safransky |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03242017-080814/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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