Kirk Johnson, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology, Fort Hays State University and the University of Guam
Dr. Kirk Johnson grew up in the Western mountains of the state of Maharashtra, in India, where he attended an International Baha'i School with students from more than thirty-five different countries. This experience had a profound and indelible impact on his life, world-view, and the course of his future career. He moved to the United States for University at the age of 17 and found himself drawn to the social sciences while an undergraduate at Fort Hays State University in Kansas. After earning his Baccalaureate Degree at FHSU in Sociology, he moved to Ohio University where he earned two Master's Degrees in Sociology and in International Development. Dr. Johnson's doctoral research while at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, took him back to the mountains of his youth where he explored the influence of television on the lives of villagers in India. Dr. Johnson and his wife then moved to the Pacific, where he has worked at the University of Guam as a professor of Sociology for the past two decades. He has maintained close ties with his first alma mater FHSU over the years and currently teaches three online courses that include: SOC 310 Introduction to Women and Gender Studies, SOC 384 Social Problems, and SOC 681 NGOs: Global Social Innovation. He has served as the Director of the Bali Field School at the University of Guam, a community development project, since 2004, providing students an opportunity to explore, through a cross-cultural lens, the dynamics between tradition and modernity, globalization and the survival of indigenous peoples and cultures, and highlights the complexity and tensions of social change in the 21st century. His research and work, as well as his service within the Baha'i community, takes him throughout the Pacific to island nations including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, Kiribati, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Hawaii, and the Northern Mariana Islands, and New Zealand. His work in Asia has primarily focused on India and Indonesia. He has published numerous books and journal articles, and given over thirty-five conference presentations around the world, focusing on research in the areas of development and social change, religion, and education, human ecology and sustainability. Dr. Jonson's ongoing work in the Pacific Asia region has allowed him to learn firsthand about the processes of community development and capacity building, at the grassroots in many different settings. To learn more more about his work, service, and his research please visit his webpage at the University of Guam: https://www.uog.edu/directory/johnson-kirk.php