The Movement Engaged Research Hub Team
Hub Director:
John G. Dale is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Movement Engaged at George Mason University. He was a Science and Technology Innovation Program Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars (2019-20) where he researched the digital transformation of human rights, and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Visiting Research Fellow (2021-22) exploring efforts to integrate human rights into national policies on AI and robotics. He serves as Scientific Advisor on the European Research Council-Consolidator Project “Transnational Advocacy Networks and Corporate Accountability for Major International Crimes.” Dr. Dale was elected Council Member of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Human Rights (2019-2022) and to the Steering Committee of the Science & Human Rights Coalition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2018-24). He is author of Free Burma: Transnational Legal Action and Corporate Accountability (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and co-author of Political Sociology: Power and Participation in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2009), and co-editor (with Raluca Grosesçu) of Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations: Civil Society and Transnational Activism across the World (Spring Nature, 2026).
Graduate Research Assistant/Project Manager:
Jeba Humayra is a second-year PhD student in Public Sociology at George Mason University, with a concentration in Globalization. She earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in International Relations from the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. During her master’s studies, she interned and later worked full-time with various international non-governmental organizations, focusing on social justice and human rights advocacy. She then served as a Monitoring and Evaluation Officer for child protection project in the Rohingya refugee camps, the largest refugee camp in the world. Jeba’s current research centers on digital governance, digital authoritarianism, and digital democratization. She examines how legal and technological systems together shape power and rights. Her work also engages questions of cyber capacity building, cross-sector trust-building in politically sensitive environments, and the challenges posed by electoral interference, surveillance technologies, IoT vulnerabilities, cybercrime, and data protection.