| This dissertation explores how Christian women strategically activated social networks to do short-term mission (STM) and take on new leadership roles, creatively reinventing and rejuvenating themselves through international volunteerism. A growing religious movement, STM carework is a democratized grassroots phenomenon, typically featuring bottom-up entrepreneurial agency rather than top-down central planning and control which lends itself to women's involvement. This research used global ethnography and visual analysis to examine and theorize how social capital and resource brokering was built locally and globally, bridging and linking women within two respective groups across international spaces: (1) an incorporated not-for-profit medical professional group that traveled regularly to Africa; and (2) a suburban women's ministry group from a megachurch who conducted a large women's retreat in the Domincan Republic and also worked in an orphanage. The first group included team members from mainline, Catholic and evangelical traditions. The second group incorporated Latina women from the megachurch's Hispanic sister congregation, and included four Latina women on the traveling team. Each group's activities and narratives illuminated the crucial role of cultural brokers to mediate material and symbolic resources essential to the achievement of their work on behalf of those deemed "needy." Also, examination of normally private marital gender relations revealed that couples negotiated fender roles either in ways they had already practiced (egalitarian) or in exceptional ways (unbending gender roles).;Research on Christian women's STM resource brokering contributes to studies on congregations, volunteerism, civil society, social capital, faith-based initiatives, international development, women's religion, tourism, pilgrimage, and religion and globalization. Both professional and stay-at-home mothers benefitted from regularized church/state funding structures (pooled tax-exempt donations) which facilitated costly travel not dependent on personal/family finances. An emerging pattern of Christians (often Pentecostal) in the Global South connected with resourced caring women from the Global North, who eschew suburban materialism for international service projects, has enabled heightened pilgrimage-like experiences which translate into constitutive narratives of personal transformation and resource brokering activities. The strategies of STM women and their intentional efforts to establish international fictive kin disrupt notions of "home"/"away from home" as well as theoretical assumptions of structural alterity conceived as "authentic" versus "inauthentic." Images of needy individuals were imprinted upon volunteers' memories and displayed through ubiquitous photos that (re)informed themselves, their families, co-workers, financial supporters and numerous networks of their own Christian gendered caring identity. This research suggests such dense interconnections of relationship mediated through media, donations, travel, and narratives, are interactions indicative of new global religion which has "gone public" as Christian care "without borders." Specifically, the overlap of various STM brokers (resource and cultural) in delimited "zones of contact" is a rich node of globalization which needs further investigation because it is within such temporally delimited nodes that juncture and disjuncture takes place. And it is here that misunderstandings and unintended consequences may derail the lofty aims of those who seek to truly make a difference in a suffering world---for the "least of these."... |
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