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The body of this dissertation is three empirical essays concerning social forces affecting urban U.S. religious congregations. The chief source of the results is an original dataset of the life histories of the religious congregations in Manhattan from 1939 to 1999. Broadly, I argue that urban congregations are affected by sociodemographic changes in the local population of people, by changes in the population of congregations nearby them, and by their own innate characteristics. The first essay (chapter 3) measures how the population of religious congregations in Manhattan changed during the 1939–1999 period and theorizes how some of the most dominant urban trends of that period may have driven the change. I argue that White flight and increasing Black wealth led the number of congregations per capita in Manhattan to increase from 1939 through the mid-1960s despite a declining population and a falling number of immigrants. From the mid-1960s onward, as depopulation and urban decay prevented Black wealth in Manhattan from continuing to rise, the number of congregations per capita stagnated. A substantial increase in immigration owing to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 prevented congregations per capita from dropping. There is reason to believe that many of the findings in this essay may apply to various other large U.S. cities as well. The second essay (chapter 4) is a test of a central tenet of the theory of religious economies: religious competition. Existing empirical tests of that theory are limited by one or more of the following two problems: (1) ambiguity regarding which religious groups are expected to compete with which other groups, and (2) a neglect of the local level (competition among congregations). Event-history analyses indicate the following: (1) the more congregations there were nearby a given congregation that were theologically dissimilar to that congregation, the less likely that congregation was to advertise; (2) when there was an increase over time in the number of nearby congregations that were theologically similar to the focal congregation, that congregation became more likely to advertise; and (3) when there was an increase over time in the number of nearby congregations that were theologically dissimilar to the focal congregation, that congregation became less likely to advertise. Implications include critiques of religious-economies theory yet also a defense from attempts to dispense with the theory wholesale. The third essay (chapter 5) adjudicates between two opposing predictions regarding the survival chances of ethnic organizations. Numerous empirical studies document the pernicious effects of racial and ethnic discrimination on individuals. Recent scholarship implies that racialized organizations may face similar disadvantages, but empirical evidence is lacking. On the other hand, there are strands of research on Black and immigrant religious congregations arguing that these congregations are sources of solidarity, which implies durability. An event-history analysis shows that, on average, Black congregations were less likely to survive a given year than congregations of any other racial/ethnic category. However, once other variables are accounted for, White nonethnic congregations had the highest mortality rate. This quantitative finding of lower mortality among ethnic congregations supports and extends qualitative findings of solidarity and strength within ethnic organizations.

Compulsory state-sanctioned schooling continues to be constructed as the “great equalizer,” and accordingly education research as a benevolent contributor to this material and ideological project of education. Following a Fanonian-Wynterian theoretical approach and cosmogonical-constellatory citation politics, I narrowed over 2,500 educational studies and reviewed approximately 150 articles and chapters that questioned the ways of knowing, being, and valuing which have naturalized these assumptions. Consequently, I theorize the cosmogony and development of the overrepresented genre-specific figure of educational researcher emerging from Man2-as-human, who has come to control the ways of knowing “education” and being an “educational researcher”: Man2-as-educational researcher. I examine how overlapping and interconnected African/Black, Asian, Latinx, Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities have engaged in modes of resistance, survivance, fugitivity/marronage, refusal and abolition to challenge this regime, and enact and imagine genres of being an educational researcher outside of the dominant order of Man2-as-educational researcher. In turn, I consider how these communities have affirmed, honored, fostered, sustained and revitalized ways of gathering, interpreting, and sharing educational knowledge for collective liberation, which have centered the wretched of the research and gaze from below. In so doing, I conceptualize and call forth the need to move toward what I am referring to as the 36thchamber of education research.

I explore how two Latinx young men made use of rapping within a creative and healing afterschool hip hop space at a California Bay Area High School. I argue that they performed a calculated, strategic ambivalence. That is, just as they composed raps that made use of wordplay with double or more meanings, they constructed personhoods that quite literally embodied double or more meanings. They became the embodiment of double entendre, strategically performing, rapping and narrativizing personas that allowed them to synchronously survive the classroom and the 'hood, subverting the "White gaze" and the gaze of the streets.

Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means to make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (in)equality. Recently, however, I have begun to question if the terms “relevant” and “responsive” are really descriptive of much of the teaching and research founded upon them and, more importantly, if they go far enough in their orientation to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society. In this essay, I offer the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy ...