Jelani Ince

Ince will use evidence from a two-year (2018-2020) ethnography of Risen Church, an interracial church in St. Louis, Missouri, to examine why DEI initiatives fail despite explicit commitments to their successful implementation. Ince will use ethnographic, interview, and administrative data to develop a sociological theory of philanthropic capture: a structural condition in which philanthropic organizations tether diversity missions to the preferences of elite donors. Ince will interrogate how to account for local activity, agency, and change without reverting to the kind of individualism that sociological approaches to studying organizations were designed to critique.