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Andrew Schrank (Olive C. Watson Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University) is one of the few academics with a true interdisciplinary trajectory and an exceptionally wide variety of interests in economic sociology and adjacent fields working on Latin America. Although he defines himself as an organizational sociologist, Andrew has held positions in both sociology and political science departments and has written about issues ranging from supply chains to foreign investment and labor standards, from healthcare to industrial policy and urban studies, and from varieties of capitalism to the role of culture in development, doing both broad comparative work and more focused case studies of small Mesoamerican countries like the Dominican Republic. Andrew co-authored the article that became the manifesto for the re-foundation of Latin America's political economy tradition in what is now the Red Economía Política America Latina (REPAL) and is currently working on a book on economic sociology and development. Andrew agreed to talk about his views on the discipline, the challenges of interdisciplinarity, and his focus on Latin America. This is the result of a deeply engaged discussion over a Skype conversation and several e-mail exchanges where he calls for a return to sociology's early motivation of studying societies through the lens of development and claims that "what we need is an economic sociology that takes Latin America seriously." We thank Andrew for his generosity in sharing his thoughts with us.

This brief article is designed to highlight an unfortunate discrepancy in the field of Latin American political economy. The field's raison d'être has never been more compelling. Latin American societies have simultaneously been experiencing profound transformations—including democratic consolidation, demographic transition, and the growth of identity politics—and a palpable sense of déjà vu animated by the recovery of commodity prices and the return of populism. In a nutshell, the region is undergoing a deep economic transformation, which takes place in the context of unprecedented levels of political participation.