Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

Efforts to “be the change you seek in the world” lead to ethical dilemmas. Doug Irvin-Erickson, Ernesto Verdeja, and I draw on the lived experiences and expertise of activists, educators, and researchers to explore how doing the work requires tough tradeoffs: between peace and justice, revolution and reform, violence and nonviolence, and between means and ends.

Drones are famous for doing bad things, but in The Good Drone, I examine their deployment for the greater good. New technology in the air changes politics on the ground. At its broadest, the book’s point is that the use of technology by social movements began well before—and goes well beyond—social media. The Good Drone is 100% Open Access here.

How do contemporary slaveholders rationalize the subjugation of other human beings, and how do they respond when their power is threatened? This unprecedented book brings the reader conversations with slaveholders, revealing the condescending and paternalistic thought processes that blind them.

Drones for Good. 2020
Morgan & Claypool

The world’s problems aren’t sectioned off into disciplines, so why are our college campuses? Gordon Hoople and I wrote Drones for Good to illustrate how educators can teach across disciplinary boundaries. In our case we were teaching an NSF-funded class on socio-technical thinking using team-based efforts to build and deploy drones for good.

In this edited volume Alyson Brysk and I propose an anti-trafficking movement that takes human rights seriously. We argue that trafficking and slavery are problems rooted in fundamentally unjust systems. In sum, rethinking trafficking requires moving our orientation from sex to slavery, from prostitution to power relations, and from rescue to rights.