ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for 2026

Fueling Development: How Black Radical Trade Unionism Transformed Trinidad and Tobago by Zophia Edwards, Johns Hopkins University

"Zophia Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and a scholar of racial capitalism, development, DuBoisian sociology, and labor who uses comparative-historical methods in her work. In Fueling Development: How Black Radical Trade Unionism Transformed Trinidad and Tobago, Edwards offers a masterful and sweeping analysis of the intersections of class, race, nation, and colonialism/post-colonialism across the 20th century. Based on extensive comparative-historical analysis, she develops a framework of “liberation unionism,” which encapsulates how Trinidad and Tobago succeeded, in terms of having high levels of democratic and redistributive development, despite their long histories of colonial exploitation. In doing so, she upends much of conventional thinking on sociology of development and draws upon literatures on race and capitalism."

Read the complete announcement on the ASA website