Contact

Phone: 470-578-6739

Email: jmuell18@kennesaw.edu

Office Location: PS 142

Office Hours:

Jason Mueller

Hello!

My name is Jason, and I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kennesaw State University.

I completed my M.A. and PhD in the Department of Sociology, at the University of California, Irvine. After that, I remained in California as an instructor of sociology for a year or two, before moving out to Georgia to begin working at KSU!

I maintain an interest in researching and teaching about diverse topics, especially social movements and protests for racial, Indigenous, economic, and environmental justice, in the US, and across Africa.

My published research has covered a wide range of interdisciplinary issues, including global political-economy, ideology and social movements in America, critical political theory, and the structural drivers of political violence in Somalia. My dissertation explored the local-to-global drivers of forced displacement and diamond extraction in Botswana and Zimbabwe. Other and ongoing research of mine explores ways to place sociology in dialoge with critical development studies, psychoanalysis, Africana studies, dialectical philosophy, and more.

Please click the Research tab in my profile for greater detail, and links to my published work. However, for just a few examples of my most recently published work, check out:

- "Theorising Universality in the Modern World-System: The Abstract, The Concrete, and the Case of Botswana" (2024) https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/97QVGUY9DRYVP2ZBAF8A/full?target=10.1080/01436597.2024.2403691. 

- "The (Im)Possibility of Anti-Systemic Politics: Uprisings, Exilic Spaces, and Alain Badiou" (2024). https://doi.org/10.55533/2765-8414.1079. 

- "State Strategy, Diamond Mining, and Indigenous Dispossession in Botswana." Critical Sociology (2024). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08969205241252619.  

- "Does the United States owe reparations to Somalia?" Race & Class (2023). https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968231155358.  

 

Being an educator is so rewarding, and I take my teaching responsibilities seriously. I love teaching courses that show students how to connect their day-to-day lives and observations to global social processes. My pedagogical technique is guided by what the literary theorist Fredric Jameson calls "cognitive mapping." A map not only shows you where you are, but helps you orient yourself in the direction in which you hope to travel. This means that I view my responsibility as a educator to not only help locate themselves in a larger web of global social relations, but figure out how to get to where they want to be (e.g., identifying the drivers of a social problem, and mapping out a possible path towards ameliorating said problem with a short, medium, and long term strategy).

  • In August 2022 I received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Political Economy of the World System (PEWS) section of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
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I am also actively involved in my profession, and routinely present research, organize sessions, and do committee work with various sections of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP). This includes, but is not limited to:

  • I served on the outreach committee for the newly formed Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations section of the ASA.
  • I served on 'best graduate paper award' committee multiple times for the Sociology of Development section of the ASA.
  • I recently served as the Newsletter editor for the Political Economy of the World-System (PEWS) section of the ASA.

 

I alway seek ways to build synergy with my committment to professional service, research, and student-success. This includes activities like mentoring and advising students on course selection, career and internship opportunities, application to graduate/professional school, and supporting their independent research endeavours.

 

Finally, I invite you to check out my MEDIA APPEARANCES (below):

- On NPR & the American Association of Collegues and Universities' (AAC&U) The Academic Minute series, discussing human rights and the US' covert war on terror in Somalia, available here.

- Discussing terrorism, war, geopolitics, and US-Somalia relations on This is Revolution Podcast, available on YouTube here.

-Discussing pop-culture, generation wars, economic inequality, and "OK Boomer" memes on This is Revolution Podcast, available on Youtube here.

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