About Me
Short Bio: Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is a professor at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies. He currently holds fellowships at the Aspen Institute and Yale, and his two latest books, Art Beyond Ego (Cambridge) and Wicked Problems (Oxford) explore the importance of taking action in challenging times.
About Me: My work focuses on social movements and human rights, with a particular focus on the role of technology. I am Professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies as well as a Scholar in Residence at the Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Network and the Co-Director of the GLC Working Group on the Future of Slavery and Emancipation at Yale University. My current projects are focused on collaboration, creativity, and strategic foresight, and I hold a number of leadership positions in this area, including:
- Faculty Director of the SPARK Social Innovation Institute at the University of San Diego
- Director of the Social Innovation Masters Program at the Kroc School
- Co-Director of the GLC Working Group on the Future of Slavery and Emancipation at Yale
- Vice President of the Art Builds Collective, a California-based 501(c)3
My current research has been supported by a number of fellowships and visiting positions:
- Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
- Visiting scholar at the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University
- Concurrent Associate Professor (2018-2021) and Visiting Professor (2021-present) of Social Movements and Human Rights at the Rights Lab, University of Nottingham
- Faculty fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics, University of California, San Diego
- Faculty fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University
- MIT Publishing Innovation Fellow, Knowledge Futures Group.
I was previously a founding faculty member at the School of Public Policy at Central European University, where I still serve as a faculty fellow at the Center for Media Data and Society. I earned my PhD in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame, where I was the Assistant Director at the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change and a dissertation fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Prior to academia I worked in human rights advocacy at Free the Slaves, the sister organization of Anti-Slavery International, itself the world’s first and longest running human rights NGO. And a long-long time ago I studied human rights and international security at Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies.
My public-facing publications can be found on Muckrack.
Contact Information
I am @achoifitz everywhere [gmail, twitter, instagram, linkedin]
Literary agent: Jill Marr (Sandra Dijkstra Agency) jill@dijkstraagency.com
Media availability: Lissette Martinez (Univ. San Diego) press@sandiego.edu