John Dale

John G. Dale is Associate Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, and served as Graduate Program Director of Sociology (2012-2016). He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Davis, in 2003, and was National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 2005. 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; translated in Turkish in 2016, and Chinese in 2017). His research explores social, cultural, legal, political, and economic relations shaping the production of knowledge, as well as empirical practices, cultural understandings, and institutional development of human rights and social justice. His current book, Hacking Human Rights, explores the digital production of interdisciplinary scientific knowledge about human rights practices -- how it generates new conflicting relational ontologies of “the human” in human rights that impact the ongoing development of the international human rights agenda -- and the significance of this transformation for shaping the contemporary political struggle over the construction of the global institutions and rules enabling and constraining the possible futures of the knowledge economy.

Professor Dale was a 2019-2020 Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, affiliated with the Science and Technology Innovation Program. He was recently elected to serve as a member of the Steering Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science & Human Rights Coalition (2018-2021) and as a Council Member of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Human Rights (2019-2022).

Degrees

• PhD, Sociology, University of California, Davis