Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
Professor
Associate Provost for Academic Strategy and Growth
Faculty Director, Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship
- PhD, Sociology, University of Notre Dame
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, PhD, is an author, educator, and speaker. His work focuses on politics, culture, technology, and social change. His recent books include Connective Creativity (Cambridge 2025), Wicked Problems (Oxford, 2022), The Good Drone (MIT Press, 2020) and What Slaveholders Think (Columbia, 2017), and his commentary includes articles in Slate, Al Jazeera, and the Guardian and appearances on BBC, NBC, and Fox News.
At USD Austin is the Faculty Director for the Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Concurrently, Austin is a Rights Lab Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham, Co-Chair of the GLC Working Group on the Future of Slavery and Emancipation at Yale University, and an inaugural Scholar in Residence at the Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Network.
Austin lives in California and can be found on LinkedIn, Google Scholar, and at austinchoifitzpatrick.com.
Courses Taught
KROC 500 Foundations: Peace, Justice & Social Change
KROC 521 Social Innovation
KROC 524 Social Innovation Practicum: Rwanda
KROC 595 Social Movements
KROC 597 Professional Portfolio
Areas of Expertise
Social Movements, Protest, Human Rights, Social Change, Technology, Ethics, Aerial Technology, Drones, Slavery and Trafficking
Professional Experience
2023-present Faculty Director, Institute for Social Innovation, University of San Diego (US)
2023-present Director, MA in Social Innovation, Kroc School, University of San Diego (US)
2022-present Scholar in Residence, Resnick Global Leadership Network, Aspen Institute (US)
2022-present Co-Director, Working Group on Future of Slavery
Affiliated Scholar, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University (US)
2023-present Member, The International Panel on the Information Environment (Switzerland)
2023-present Member, Strategic Planning Committee, University of San Diego (US)
2019-present Co-Founder & Vice-President, Art Builds Collective (501c3) (US)
2018-present Rights Lab Visiting Professor of Social Movements and Human Rights,
School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham (UK)
2014-present Associate Editor, Journal of Human Trafficking (US)
2008-present International Advisory Board, Mobilization (US)
Scholarly Work
Books and Edited Work
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin and Gordon Hoople. 2025. Collective Creativity: What Artists can Teach us About Collaboration. Cambridge University Press (Essentials Series).
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin, Douglas Irvin-Erickson, and Ernesto Verdeja (equal co-editors). 2022. Wicked Problems: The Ethics of Action for Peace, Rights, and Justice. Oxford University Press.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2020. The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance. MIT Press.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin and Gordon Hoople. 2020. Drones for Good: An Integrated Approach for Developing a Sociotechnical Mindset. Morgan & Claypool (Synthesis Lectures on Engineers, Technology, and Society).
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2017. What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize What They Do. Columbia University Press.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin (ed). 2016. Journal of Human Trafficking. Special Issue 2(1): “Slaveholders and Traffickers.”
Brysk, Alison and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick (eds). 2012. From Human Trafficking to Human Rights: Rethinking Contemporary Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Recent Articles on Human Rights and Social Movements
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2024. “Disruption and Emergence: How to Think about Human Rights Futures.” Journal of Human Rights. 23(1). (link).
Symposium Responses:
Gellers, Joshua C. “An Inconvenient Reflection on Human Rights: Comments on Choi- Fitzpatrick’s Article: “Disruption and Emergence”. Journal of Human Rights. 23(3). 314- 319.
Dawes, James. “The Future of Human Rights.” Journal of Human Rights. 23(3), 320-325.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin and Amelia Watkins-Smith. 2021. “Dyadic, Variegated, and Intersectional: Toward A Dynamic Theory of Human Rights Agency.” Human Rights Quarterly (43)4.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2016. “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Human Rights Violators in Comparative Perspective.” Journal of Human Trafficking 2(1).
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2016. “From Rescue to Representation: A Human Rights Approach to the Contemporary Anti-Slavery Movement.” Journal of Human Rights.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2015. “Managing Democracy in Social Movement Organizations.” Social Movement Studies. 14(2).
Vaidyanathan Brandon, Michael Strand, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Thomas Buschman, Meghan Davis, and Amanda Varela. 2015. “Causality in Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment and Critique.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2014. “Drones for Good: Technological Innovation, Social Movements and the State." Journal of International Affairs. Volume 68; Number 1. 1-18.
McVeigh, Rory, Josh Dinsman, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, and Priyamvada Trivedi. 2011. “Obama vs. Clinton: Categorical Boundaries and Intra-Party Electoral Outcomes.” Social Problems 58(1): 47-68.
Recent Articles on Technology and Engineering
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2024. “Disruption and Emergence: How to Think about Human Rights Futures.” Journal of Human Rights. 23(1). (link).
Hoople, Gordon, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Nathaniel Parde, Diane Hoffoss, Max Mellette, Rachel Nishimura, Virginia Gutman. 2019. “About Time: Visualizing Time at Burning Man.” The STEAM Journal 4(1).
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin, Hoople, Gordon, and Elizabeth Reddy. 2019. “Drones for Good: Interdisciplinary Project Based Learning Between Engineering and Peace Studies.” International Journal of Engineering Education.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin, Reddy, Elizabeth, and Gordon Hoople. 2019. “Boundary Objects in Classroom Practice: Using Drones to Foster Critical Engagement.” Journal of Engineering Studies. Impact Factor: .73
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin and Gordon Hoople. 2019. “Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Mindset: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Using Drones.” Advances in Engineering Education.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin, Tautvydas Juskauskas, and Mohammed Sabur. 2018. “All the Protestors fit to Count: Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Estimate Crowd Size in Urban Environs.” Interface 10(1-2), 297-321.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin, Reddy, Elizabeth, and Gordon Hoople. 2019. “Boundary Objects in Classroom Practice: Using Drones to Foster Critical Engagement.” Journal of Engineering Studies
Elizabeth Reddy, Gordon Hoople, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick. 2018. “Peace Engineering: Investigating Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Effects in a Team-Based Course About Drones”, in American Society for Engineering Education.
Gordon Hoople, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick. 2017. “Engineering Empathy: A Multidisciplinary Approach Combining Engineering, Peace Studies, and New Technology,” in American Society for Engineering Education, Cleveland, Ohio.
Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin and Tautvydas Juskauskas. 2015. “Up in the Air: Applying the Jacobs Crowd Formula to Drone Imagery.” Procedia Engineering 107.