CSSR Movement Engaged Research Hub
Weekly Meetings
Friday, October 10, 2025 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Fuse at Mason Square, #6302
Fall 2025 Schedule
08/29/2025: General Meeting
Discussion and planning for the academic year
09/05/2025: General Meeting
Continuation of discussion and planning for the academic year
09/12/2025: Reading Group Meet-Up
Dale, John G. “Corporate Accountability and the Ecological Turn: Mining Lessons from the Rights of Nature Movement,” in Raluca Grosesçu and John G. Dale, eds., Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations: Civil Society and Transnational Action across the World (Springer, Series on Interdisciplinary Studies on Human Rights, 2025).
09/19/2025: Reading Group Meet-Up
09/26/2025: A Conversation with Suzie Choi
About Suzie Choi:
I stepped into the field of international development with the belief that large, Western institutions, like the UN, offered the clearest path to impact, shaped by my own country, South Korea’s own trajectory as a so-called “developed” nation. Over time, I came to see that good intentions alone are insufficient: beneath them lie power dynamics and definitions of progress that are neither neutral nor universally right. My undergraduate work at Duke, including my honors thesis on anti–Belt and Road Indigenous movements in Ecuador, sharpened this critique and instilled in me a commitment to interrogating who defines, leads, and evaluates development.
Professionally, my experiences with organizations such as Saath, Co.Act, Counterpart International, and, currently, Namati have shown me the transformative potential of communities when they are connected, empowered, and mobilized. I aim to advance scholarship and practice that reconceptualize movements not as linear campaigns measured by discrete outcomes, but as dynamic, “circulatory processes” whose impact lies in resilience, collaboration, and narrative change. My long-term goal is to bridge rigorous research with practical strategies that strengthen locally led movements and reframe how success in international development is defined and sustained.
10/03/2025 - Dissertation Presentation – Democratic Experiments with Technology by Dhruv Deepak
The Center for Social Science Research’s Movement Engaged Hub is hosting a dissertation discussion. Dr John Dale will be speaking to Dhruv Deepak about “Democratic Experiments with Technology,” a major theme from his ongoing dissertation research.
Dhruv is a PhD candidate in Sociology at George Mason University. He studies the community-led stewardship of digital resources — data, platforms, and infrastructures. His analysis focuses on digital cooperatives, data sovereignty initiatives, and peer production systems, to understand how they transform extractive “data relations” into sources of community strength. Alongside the dissertation, he leads George Mason’s Digital Commonwealth Project: an engaged research initiative that designs accountable digital infrastructure to empower communities.
The dissertation examines how rules, architectures, and incentives in the digital economy shape power and public outcomes. Central to his research is the idea that we are not confined to existing paradigms: economics of data extraction, markets, digital surveillance and platform capitalism. Instead, Dhruv proposes that through democratic experiments, we can transform our relationship with technology.
10/10/2025 - GMU Sociology Alumni Mohamed Elgohari' s Talk on "From Legalism to Algorithmic Control: Digital Authoritarianism, Legal Instruments, and the AI-Enhanced Surveillance State in the MENA Region"
Mohamed Elgohari is a scholar–practitioner of authoritarianism, law, and technology whose work bridges rigorous research and movement-centered practice. He earned a PhD in Sociology from George Mason University, where his dissertation examined how political regimes instrumentalize law and militarized governance to consolidate authoritarian rule. Building on this foundation, his current research investigates algorithmic governance in the Middle East, tracing how cybercrime and counterterrorism legal frameworks intersect with platform policies, data pipelines, and automated enforcement to produce everyday digital repression, leading to a regional regime complex where regimes learn how to upgrade digital authoritarianism and algorithmic control.
Elgohari led the Propaganda team at the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security and Threats, directing analyses of militant groups’ and other non-state actors’ propaganda and influence operations across the MENA region. In the policy arena, he has held roles at leading institutes—including Assistant Director at the Atlantic Council, MENA Program Officer at Freedom House, and researcher and team lead at Democracy for the Arab World Now—where he produced practitioner-facing briefs, data-driven assessments, and training modules.
10/17/2025- We Were Almost Emancipated, Is It Slipping Away?The Paradox of Law, Rights, and Reform in Bangladesh’s (Democratic) Transition
Presenter: Jeba Humayra
Jeba is a second-year PhD student in Sociology at George Mason University and Graduate Research Assistant with the Movement Engaged Research Hub at the Center for Social Science Research. Her current research explores the intersection of technology, law, politics, and human rights in Bangladesh, situating these dynamics within broader global and regional trends of digital authoritarianism.
In this workshop, Jeba will present her ongoing project to members of the Movement Engaged Hub. The session will be structured as a work-in-progress workshop, where she will share preliminary ideas and findings, invite feedback, and engage in collaborative discussion to help refine her research trajectory.