News Highlights
We’re delighted to announce the latest edited volume by our Director, John G. Dale, co-edited with Raluca Grosescu, titled Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations: Civil Society and Transnational Activism across the World.
About this book
This edited volume is the first collection to critically explore the role, limitations, and internal fragmentation of social activism for corporate accountability across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. It analyses a variety of NGOs, trade unions, and grassroots movements and their transnational mobilizations for holding accountable business actors involved in human rights violations and environmental degradation. The book emphasizes the diverse visions and strategies extolled by these civic actors: from civil and criminal litigations, efforts to prohibit and punish business misconduct through national and international legislation, to boycotts, and memorialization projects. By adopting an actor-focused perspective and examining their national and transnational activism, the collection provides an innovative perspective across three main themes: civil society and social movements as key drivers of corporate accountability efforts; the fragmentation of the global corporate accountability movement across ontological, ideological, regional, and professional lines; the Janus-faced paradigm of transnational activism for corporate accountability. The volume argues that corporate accountability coalitions are successful especially when social actors form alliances across borders and professional sectors. Such transnational and intersectoral engagements create counter-hegemonic discourses against corporate impunity, push for more inclusive justice projects, and multiply spaces and ideas of accountability. Yet, civil societies and social movements themselves are fragmenting over the meaning, scope, and tactics of corporate accountability due to different local, national and regional contexts, ideological variations regarding human rights and economic development, and diverse professional understandings of accountability processes. This is an open access book.
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)
Mohamed Mohamed (PhD Candidate in Sociology) has been awarded the Student Paper Prizeat the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) annual conference. The winning paper, which is a chapter of Mohamed’s PhD dissertation (co-advisors: John Dale and Lester Kurtz), was originally presented at the BRISMES annual conference in July 2023. Here is an excerpt from the Prize Committee’s feedback on Mohamed’s paper:
“We had several excellent submissions to this year’s paper prize, but Mohamed Mohamed’s paper stood out as conceptually innovative and empirically rigorous. We were amazed at the precision and depth of the paper and expect it to offer an important contribution to Middle East Studies, as it literally changes the way we think about domestic religious establishments and their global partners and influence.”
Paper Title
Selling God: Al-Azhar, UAE and Transubstantiation of Religious Capital
Paper Abstract
The intersection between al-Azhar and global politics has been largely overlooked by scholars, creating a gap in the literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between al-Azhar and the dynamics of politics from a transnational lens, based on interviews with officials at al-Azhar Sheikhdom, Al-Azhar University, and Al-Azhar Observatory for Combating Extremism. The study examines how the UAE has been instrumentalizing al-Azhar’s ‘religious capital’ to advance its foreign policy efforts against political Islam and position itself as a major advocate of ‘peace’ in the region. The paper argues that the Emirati instrumentalization of al-Azhar’s ‘religious capital’ has taken various forms, including appointing Imam al-Tayyeb as the chairman of the UAE-based Muslim Council of Elders, sponsoring the establishment of the Al-Azhar Observatory for Combating Extremism and relying on Azharite Ulama in its ‘peace-based’ initiatives, which have been at the forefront of Emirati foreign policy for over a decade. Moreover, the paper highlights the intricate reciprocity between al-Azhar and the UAE, manifested in substantial financial assistance and Grand Imam al-Tayyeb’s close rapport with the Emirati leadership, which has facilitated a partial reframing of the institutional relationship between al-Azhar and the Egyptian state.
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.