Phillip Hough, Ph. D

Dr. Phillip Hough, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, was awarded a 2018-2019 Fellowship for $50,000 from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). In its effort to advance scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences, the ACLS has provided fellowships for almost 100 years to support the production of major pieces of scholarly work in these disciplines.

Dr. Hough’s project, Global Markets, Local Labor: Development, Production and Crisis in Rural Colombia, engages contemporary scholarly debates about labor rights, repression, and development in the global economy through a comparative and world historical analysis of local labor regime dynamics in three economic sub-regions of rural Colombia: coffee, bananas, and cocaine. The research for this project is rooted in over a decade of research that includes various rounds of qualitative fieldwork in Colombia, quantitative data analysis of social protests, political violence, and local labor regime dynamics, and secondary data analysis of global market trends. Unique to this study is how Dr. Hough positions these local labor regimes macro-historically, using commodity chains and world hegemony frameworks to highlight the development opportunities and obstacles associated with each commodity market from the heyday of US power in the postwar decades into the present era of 21st century capitalism. Dr. Hough finds that the development opportunities offered by the world market have shrunk over time as US world hegemony unraveled, leaving Colombia’s local labor regimes squeezed between periods of intense labor repression and social crisis.

Dr. Hough will use the fellowship to complete the writing of his book on this research project.