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Andrew Johnson was a research associate with CRCC’s Religious Competition and Creative Innovation (RCCI) initiative. He previously was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of If I Give My Soul: Faith Behind Bars in Rio de Janeiro and producers of documentary film on Pentecostalism inside of prison in Rio de Janeiro. Andrew conducted the research inside of Rio de Janeiro’s prisons as member of the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative and is interested in studying religious practice on the margins of society.

Andrew received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2012. Before entering the doctoral program at Minnesota, he served as a foreign service officer in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and worked at the U.S. Embassies in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Brasilia, Brazil.

In 2003, Johnson was the research coordinator for Associacao Brasileira Beneficente Aslan (ABBA) in São Paulo, Brazil, where he developed and coordinated a research project on the children living on the streets of the city. Prior to that, he worked for Urban Ventures in Minneapolis as a coach and mentor in an athletic program directed at inner-city youth. Between 1997 and 2000, he also served as program director for Phillips Neighborhood Basketball Outreach, a mentoring program for at-risk high school boys.