About
Joshua Lew McDermott is a sociologist and international political economist. He is an emerging leading scholar in the study of informality and informal labor.
He has conducted years of field work in West Africa (Sierra Leone) and also conducts field work in Latin America (Mexico). Utilizing ethnographic and mixed methods, his work explores the nature of work, underdevelopment, the state, class formation, masculinity, land, and peripheral capitalism in the Global South.
At the city level, his work interrogates questions of stratification, global value chains, gentrification, policing, petty trading, and informality in Latin America and Africa. On the agrarian side, his work engages questions of agrarian change, extractivism, land grabbing, class formation, and contemporary plantation capitalism in rural West Africa.
McDermott is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the graduate coordinator of the Masters of Applied Sociology program at Southeastern Louisiana University. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh in December 2021.
Research and Teaching Interests:
Agrarian Change, Class and Class Formation, Culture, Development, Environmental Sociology, Ethnography, Gentrification, Global Studies, Globalization, Inequality, Informal and Precarious Labor, International Political Economy, Land, Marxist Theory, Mexico, Postcolonialism, Poverty, Race and Ethnicity, Research Methods, Social and Labor Movements, Social Reproduction, Social Theory, Sierra Leone, the State, Urban Studies, West Africa
Positions and Accolades
2026 – present: Editorial Board Member: Journal of Race and Ethnicity
2025 – present: Council member (treasurer) of the Marxist Sociology section of the American Sociological Association
2025: Winner of the Distinguished Article Award of the Year award from the Political Economy of the World-System (PEWS) section of the American Sociological Association for the article “Difference Between Global South Cities: Mexico City, Freetown, and the Global Division of Urban Informal Labor.”
2024-2025: Fulbright Scholar in Sierra Leone
2020-2021: Social Science Dissertation Fellow. University of Pittsburgh.
2019-2020: Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellow. University of Pittsburgh.
2019: Winner of the Norman P. Hummon Research Award for best graduate student research paper for the article “Towards an Icon Model of Gentrification: Global Capitalism, Policing, and the Struggle for Iconic Spaces in Mexico City.”
Contact: [email protected]