Graduate Program
Austin Choi Fitzpatrick
Areas of Interest
Political Sociology and Social Movements
Profile
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, M.A. is a scholar activist interested in social movements for human rights.
Austin's broader research agenda explores the inspiration and motivation that leading individuals (and communities) to leave slavery, asking what 'sustainable emancipation strategies' might look like. His current research include a local study of grassroots social movements, a project examining how the war on terror impacts the United State's human rights efforts, and an ongoing survey tracking evangelical Christians' conceptualization of and response to modern slavery and human trafficking.
He is currently the Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change and the Assistant Editor at Mobilization, the international journal of social movements. He is also a Robert F. Ganey Graduate Fellow at the Center for Social Concerns (where he is developing an undergraduate course on modern slavery and human trafficking) and a Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Genders Studies Department (where he is working with Jackie Smith to develop a course on Social Movements and Globalization).
The rest of Austin's time is spent serving as National Outreach Coordinator at Free the Slaves, an international human rights non-profit located in Washington D.C. There he directs Faith in Action, an interfaith initiative against slavery. He is also the co-founder of Free the Slaves' WarSlavery Campaign, a project calling on the United States government to end taxpayer-supported slavery in Iraq.
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