Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is assistant professor of political sociology at the Joan B Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego. he was previously assistant professor of political sociology at the School of Public Policy at Central European University. He specializes in social movements and human rights in both the United States and on the Indian subcontinent. He is also core faculty at the Center for Media, Data and Society.

His current project, funded by the National Science Foundation, explores the impact social movements have on human rights violators in rural India. Early work along these lines can be found in a volume co-edited with Alison Brysk: From Human Trafficking to Human Rights: Reframing Contemporary Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press Series on Human Rights).

In his most recent book, What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize What They Do (2017, Columbia University Press), Choi-Fitzpatrick argues that slaveholders have been overlooked by the contemporary abolitionist movement. Taking them seriously, he suggests, advances scholarship on social movements, human rights, and anti-trafficking. Policy implications include the possibility that international development efforts recognize that some of their beneficiaries are also rights violators. Shorter articles along these lines can be found in Huffington Post, Aeon, and The Guardian.

Choi-Fitzpatrick is currently working on a new book that explores the ways social movements use new technologies. In particular he focuses on the ways unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or “drones”) are used by civil society actors as they work to hold both businesses and governments accountable. Early efforts to both sketch an overview of public usage of the technology and to advance an ethical framework for its use can be found in an the Journal of International Affairs. He is working on an innovative method for estimating the size of protest events and other mass gatherings,. Findings from this project have been presented at Harvard, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, and Central European University. Shorter essays on the topic can be found at Slate and Al Jazeera.

With students at the Kroc School he has authored a report on non-violent drones use from 2009-2015.

Choi-Fitzpatrick holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Notre Dame, where he was Assistant Director at the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change. Prior to academia he worked as a human rights advocate. From 2003 through 2009 he was on staff at Free the Slaves, the sister organization of Anti-Slavery International, itself the world’s first and longest running human rights NGO. He studied human rights and international security at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

Selected publications and features

• What Slaveholders Think. (2017) New York: Columbia University Press.
• From Human Trafficking to Human Rights. (2012) Co-edited with Alison Brysk. Philadelphia, PA:University of Pennsylvania Press (series on Human Rights).
• "Drones Will Change The Way We Estimate Crowd Sizes, and That’s a Big Deal" at Slate.
• "How the FAA’s Drone Policy Will Affect the Rest of The World" at Slate.
• "To seek and save the lost: human trafficking and salvation schemas among American evangelicals" at the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2014
• "Managing Democracy in Social Movement Organizations" at Social Movement Studies

External links

• Official website