Going beyond research to find social justice

Justin Paulson joins Carleton this year as a new faculty member in the department of sociology and anthropology. With an interdisciplinary background, Paulson brings a myriad of experience in his field including research in social theory and political economy, and on social movements of the Left and Right in different regions of North and South America.

The assistant professor’s involvement with social justice movements often goes beyond research. He has been a participant-observer in several of the movements he studies, including Zapatismo and, more recently, the US anti-war movement; although he says the latter was “effectively dead on arrival.” Scholars don’t cease to be political, Paulson says, but neither must they give up their critical perspectives when they engage in political activities. (Paulson points to the example of Edward Said, from whom he draws inspiration as a model of engaged scholarship.) Paulson finds himself much more interested in the differences between movements than in their putative commonalities, and some of his recent work was rooted in a contrast of Zapatismo and the global justice movement, which are frequently lumped together, but which he argues are formally and substantively quite distinct.

The Oregon native is eager to begin working with both undergraduate and graduate students, hoping first and foremost to “estrange them from the world they know and are comfortable in” by engaging their critical thinking skills.

“If they leave my classroom less sure of the world than before they walked in, I’ve done my job,” says Paulson.