News Highlights
Movement Engaged Congratulates Our Graduates Research Affiliates Who Successfully Completed Their Dissertations (2024-2025)
Junghyun Nam, Self-Disciplining Protest Within the Candlelight Protests in South Korea in 2016-2017 (2025)
Mohamed Elgohari, The Paradox of Legalism: The Instrumentalization of Law, the Militarization of Governance, and the Consolidation of Authoritarianism in Post-2011 Egypt (2025)
Sevil Suleymani, Nationalism, Racialization, and the Politics of Inclusion: The Case of Turks in Iran (1828-1940) (2025)
Hansel Aguilar, "Un Lugar Muy Especial: Navigating the Tensions Between ‘Parens Patriae’, 'Legal Violence,' and the Rights of Central American Unaccompanied Minors in the U.S. Legal System" (2024)
Maria Valdovinos Olson, The Care Promise: Understanding the Role, Promise, and Risk of Care Institutions in Prisoner Reentry (2024)
Mohamed Mohamed, Al-Azhar Re-Imagined: State Appropriation, Religious Capital, and Political Transnationalism, 1924-2024 (2024)
Graduate student’s research examines how identity impacts world affairs
by Jerome Boettcher
When Ilya Kim, BA Global Affairs '23, arrived at George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus after three years as an undergraduate student at Mason Korea, he already knew he wanted to pursue his master’s degree in sociology.
Luckily for him, Shannon Davis, Mason Korea’s associate dean for faculty and academic affairs, had worked in George Mason’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology for more than 15 years. She pointed him toward John Dale, associate professor of sociology and director of Movement Engaged, the social movement research hub of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ (CHSS) Center for Social Science Research (CSSR).
Now a sociology graduate student, Kim received the 2025 CHSS Dean’s Challenge Scholarship, which recognizes exceptional students who have demonstrated academic excellence, a commitment to education as a powerful tool for change, and commitment to leadership and community engagement. It is among the most competitive and prestigious scholarships that the college offers and is open to all CHSS students.
Junghyun Nam selected for the Michigan Korean Studies Summer Institute and CHR Summer Doctoral Fellowship
Junghyun Nam, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, has been selected to participate in the Michigan Korean Studies Summer Institute, hosted by the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. This competitive one-week residential program will provide Junghyun with an invaluable opportunity to engage in collaborative learning and interdisciplinary agenda-setting focused on Korean democracy through the lens of gender. As a participant, Junghyun will attend a series of interdisciplinary seminars exploring the history of democratization, representational politics, the current status of Korean democracy, and the complex relationship between gender and class in Korean society. This experience will significantly contribute to Junghyun's ongoing research and academic growth.
Junghyun has also been awarded a Summer Doctoral Fellowship from the Center for Humanities Research. As a recipient of this fellowship, Junghyun will have the opportunity to present her research on the nexus of repression and collective action during the fall semester of 2024.
Maria Valdovinos Olson recipient of National Science Foundation and American Society of Criminology awards.
Congratulations to Maria Valdovinos Olson, a doctoral candidate in the Sociology program and research affiliate at the Movement Engaged Research Hub in the Center for Social Science Research.
Maria was recently selected by Arizona State University, New College to receive a National Science Foundation Law and Science Dissertation Grant Award. The Law and Science Dissertation Grant supports dissertation research projects that will advance scientific theory and understanding of the connections between human behavior and law, legal institutions, or legal processes.
Maria has also been selected as the recipient of the 2022 American Society of Criminology, Division on Corrections and Sentencing Dissertation Scholarship Award. The award recognizes students who are working on a dissertation with the potential to make a unique and important contribution to the field of corrections and sentencing.
Maria’s dissertation addresses the question of how existing and envisioned institutions, systems, and policies can best organize the provision of supportive services and care for the incarcerated/formerly incarcerated with a focus on the transitional yet extremely consequential period between pre-release, entry into community corrections, and eventual release into the community. Her dissertation committee is chaired by John G. Dale and includes Amy L. Best and James C. Witte.
Congratulations Sean Doody and Ivan Kislenko on completing their dissertations in Summer 2022
Dr. Sean Doody completed his dissertation titled "Mapping Discourse in the Intellectual Dark Web: A Critical Computational Sociology" under the primary guidance of Dr. John Dale. The dissertation studies an online fan community (“subreddit”) of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW) on the social media platform Reddit to understand the social and epistemological significance of the IDW within the social setting of what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism.” Using deep neural language models, a novel topic modeling algorithm (BERTopic), and qualitative content analysis, this research offers a discursive mapping of the social, cultural, and political issues structuring discourse on the IDW subreddit. Across a sample of more than 400,000 Reddit comments, my exploratory topic model discovers 114 topics nested within 10 topical categories: Culture Wars; Governance & Political Institutions; IDW-Related; Platforms, Media & Information; Political Economy; Political Ideologies; Race & Ethnicity; Science, Knowledge & Epistemology; and Sex & Gender. Emergent from these ten categories are three overarching meta-themes: Sensemaking in Communicative Capitalism; Identity, Ideologies, and Social Justice; and Crises of Civilization. Through my mixed methods analysis, I argue that the chief social significance of the IDW is based in how, through its discourses, criticisms, and “sensemaking” practices, it provides a sense of reality to its constituents amidst the profound epistemic pessimism and social distrust foundational to communicative capitalism.
Dr. Ivan Kislenko completed his dissertation titled "The Idea of Global Sociology in The International Sociological Agenda: Unity and Diversity of Interpretations". He holds an MA in Sociology from Lomonosov Moscow State University and, now, a PhD from HSE University (Moscow, Russia) and Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium). Ivan was also a Fulbright Affiliate Research Fellow at George Mason University (2021-2022) and an Affiliate of the Movement Engaged Research Hub.