Hank Johnston
Professor
Office: NH-220 | Phone: (619) 594-1323
Email: [email protected]
Professor Hank Johnston is recognized as a leading scholar of social and political movements. In 2022, he received the SDSU Global Researcher Award, and in 2023, he was honored with the John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in Social Movement Scholarship, awarded at the Center for the Study of Social Movements, University of Notre Dame. He organizes annual SDSU-Hansen International Conferences on nonviolent protest and social movements. He also coordinates the Peace Corps Prep Program on campus and—as part of the program—manages the William R. Mundt Peace Scholarships. The Peace Corps is a volunteer organization that promotes peace through exchange and development.
Professor Johnston’s research analyzes cultural and interpretative dimensions of social movements, such as discourse, identity, and framing of claims and motives. Many of his empirical studies have focused on nationalist mobilizations and nonviolent resistance in a wide range of counties and regions: Spain, Mexico, Poland, China, Estonia, Chechnya, Israel, and Syria. He has written over sixty journal articles and chapters on these topics—most recently on the MAGA movement in the U.S. and on protest in China and Hong Kong. He has published fourteen academic books: coming out soon, Global Right-Wing Extremism, (in press 2025), and recently, Protest and Resistance in the Chinese Party State (with Sheldon Zhang, 2022). His other books include Racialized Resistance and the State (with Pam Oliver, 2020), Social Movements, Nonviolent Resistance and the State (2019), What is a Social Movement? (2014, Spanish and Farsi editions in 2022), and States and Social Movements (also in an Arabic edition, 2019). His research has been cited over 12,000 times by other scholars. He is the founding editor and publisher of Mobilization: An International Quarterly, the leading research journal on protest and social movements. He also edits a social movement monograph series with Routledge Books, the Mobilization Series on Social Movements and Protest, with over thirty titles in its list.
Professor Johnston teaches courses in nonviolence and social change (SOC458), social movements, protest, and revolution (SOC 457), social psychology (SOC410), social change (SOC450), political sociology (SOC537), and race and ethnicity (SOC355). He has won several teaching awards and fellowships for teaching innovation. For relaxation, he enjoys time with his wife and children and reading spy and mystery novels. For sanity and renewal, he goes outdoors—running trails, swimming laps, biking, backpacking, off-road camping.