Scott B. Martin (Ph.D., Columbia University) has taught regularly in the New School’s Graduate Program in International Affairs program since 2005 as well as in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University since 1998. Prof. Martin has also been a Lecturer of Political Science and Latin American Studies at Princeton University and a full-time Visiting Lecturer at Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University (2001), where he also served for two years as Assistant Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies, and regularly served as a freelance research contributor to Latin American reports of the Economist Intelligence Unit for over a decade. His areas of research and teaching specialization are comparative and transnational labor politics, comparative social policy, corporate social responsibility in transnational corporations, politics/policy of socio-economic development, and Latin American political economy. He is co-author of Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil: Limits of Global Diffusion in Latin America (Palgrave, 2021), exploring the nationally contingent patterns of conflict and cooperation between unions and regulators on one hand the U.S. supermarket giant, on the other (with João Paulo Veiga and Katiuscia Galhera). He co-edited and contributed to El Estado de Bienestar ante la Globalización: El Caso de Norteamérica (El Colegio de México, 2012, with Ilán Bizberg); Competitiveness and Development: Local Actors and Institutions (São Paulo, SENAC, 2001); and The New Politics of Inequality: Rethinking Participation and Representation (Oxford, 1997).
For 2021-22 he was the recipient of a Centennial Fellowship research grant from the American Political Science Association for his work on labor conflict and algorithmic management at e-commerce giant Amazon’s warehouses in Brazil and Mexico. As Heilbroner Faculty Fellow he will continue this project and also further develop a research network on “global Amazon” in comparative international perspective that he has formed with an eye toward an authors’ workshop and volume he will edit. The variations in local and national patterns of conflict around Amazon’s contentious and high-stress workplace and broader business model on a range of issues related to labor and digital rights and environmental justice and across North and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, and Asia will be the focus of that multi-author, collaborative work.