D Slater
Biographic Data
| ID | 11492 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Slater |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Slater |
| SIGNATURE | SLATER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4767-3187 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 814 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1885 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Symposium on ‘Do ethnographers make markets?’
This special issue has been a truly collective inquiry. It began with a simple intuition: the fact that social researchers, who normally study how practitioners make markets, are invited to collaborate in market interventions is something worth thinking about. Those who contributed with their articles generously agreed to work with this premise (Björklund Larsen Citation2023; Geiger and Gross Citation2022; Onto and Fernandes Citation2025; Ossandó…
Challenging but worth it: The purpose of participatory research in urban health, an evaluation and derived framework
Strategic ambiguity: A Roundtable on Cultural Economy and Consumer Culture
This lightly edited transcript records the discussion at the opening roundtable of the What Was Cultural Economy? symposium at City, University of London in January 2020. In it, Don Slater, Sean Nixon and Liz McFall, all participants in the original ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy' reflect on the conceptual and institutional history of ‘cultural economy’ and how it intersected with their shared interests in advertising and consumer culture. Their i…
Democracy, Development and Industrial Policy in Nigeria: A Historical Contextualisation
The article places Nigeria’s political and economic challenges in historical and global context. As opposed to viewing democracy or development emerging simply as the ‘will of the people’ or ‘political will’, it encourages a historical and structural view of the phenomena. Sustained democratic institutions and intensive economic growth emerge under particular conditions where the continued maintenance of hegemony and gate-keeping extractive state…
Making space for 'the social: Connecting Sociology and Professional Practices in Urban Lighting Design
Lighting is increasingly recognized as a significant social intervention by both lighting professionals and academic social scientists. However, what counts as 'the social' is diverse and contested, with consequences for what kind of 'social' is performed or invented. Based on a long-term research programme, we argue that collaboration between sociologists and lighting professionals requires negotiating discourses and practices of 'the social'. T…
Markets, materiality and the ‘new economy’
The contemporary 'cultural turn' in thinking about economic processes has been deeply bound up with narratives of 'dematerialisation'. This chapter argues that characterisations of 'new economy' are based on the idea of dematerialisation are problematic because the distinction on which they are based misrepresents the issue of materiality. 'Dematerialisation', however, rests on a dubious distinction that has plagued much social theory: the distin…
How the World Changed Social Media
How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we b…
Message Variability and Heterogeneity: A Core Challenge for Communication Research
Messages are central to human social experience, and pose key conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of communication. In response to these challenges, we outline a systematic approach to conceptualizing, operationalizing, and analyzing messages. At the conceptual level, we distinguish between two core aspects of messages: message variability (the defined and operationalized features of messages) and message heterogeneity (the unde…
Reassembling the Cultural: Fashion models, brands and the meaning of ‘culture’ after ANT
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, s…
Critical and Moral Stances in Consumer Studies
Moments and Movements in the Study of Consumer Culture: A discussion between Daniel Miller and Don Slater
Etnografia on e off-line: Cibercafés em Trinidad
O presente artigo questiona pressupostos sobre a distinção, comum na pesquisa de Internet, entre on-line e off-line. Várias pesquisas presumiram a "virtualidade", bem como uma forte divisão entre o on-line e o off-line como sendo um dado e um ponto de partida metodológico e analítico em pesquisa. Argumentamos que quando se aborda o uso de fato da Internet a partir de uma abordagem etnográfica, uma tal distinção se revela como um feito social alta…
Existentialism with an Historical Imagination: A round-table discussion with Agnes Heller and Marshall Berman
Technology, politics and the market: An interview with Michel Callon
2002). Technology, politics and the market: an interview with Michel Callon. Economy and Society: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 285-306
Making Things Real
If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings (such as, in this case, an Internet setting) which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as 'things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material ('sexpics') and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The paper argues that although, or because…
Making Things Real: Ethics and Order on the Internet
If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings (such as, in this case, an Internet setting) which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as `things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material (`sexpics') and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The paper argues that although, or because…
From calculation to alienation: Disentangling Economic Abstractions
This article uses a debate between Michel Callon and Daniel Miller to explore tensions within economic sociology and anthropology.The tension is between characterizations of markets and economic rationality that seem to dissolve them into a generalized notion of culture and those which seem to abstract them as specific social forms. The paper argues that markets are best defined in terms of a form of transaction rather than a specific mode of cal…
Introduction: The Technological Economy
This article is an overview of Michel Callon's contribution to the reformulation of economic sociology and anthropology. It contextualizes Callon's concepts within science and technology studies, and indicates the main lines of influence on his thinking about economic processes. Callon's work also opens up a number of debates and challenges to current perspectives within economic sociology. Finally, the article considers the way in which Callon's…
In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music , by A. McRobbie
(2000). In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music, by A. McRobbie. Fashion Theory: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 201-203
The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach
This path breaking book is the first to provide a rigorous and comprehensive examination of Internet culture and consumption. A rich ethnography of Internet use, the book offers a sustained account not just of being online, but of the social, political and cultural contexts which account for the contemporary Internet experience. From cyber cafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Intern…
Trading Sexpics on IRC: Embodiment and Authenticity on the Internet
Cyberspace, the internet and vituality are widely understood in terms of poststructuralist or antiessentialist expectations that when identity is separated from physical bodies it is experienced as self-evidently performative: we might therefore expect that new kinds of identities will be enacted on-line, and that participants will frame these identities as performances rather than judging them in terms of their truth or authenticity. This articl…
Sex and Sociality: Comparative Ethnographies of Sexual Objectification
This article is intended as a critique of recent theorizations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers (in particular Georges Bataille) are confronted with field data on …
On the wings of the sign: Commodity culture and social practice
The Exeter Book ( Codex Exoniensis )
The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach
This path breaking book is the first to provide a rigorous and comprehensive examination of Internet culture and consumption. A rich ethnography of Internet use, the book offers a sustained account not just of being online, but of the social, political and cultural contexts which account for the contemporary Internet experience. From cyber cafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Intern…
From calculation to alienation: Disentangling Economic Abstractions
This article uses a debate between Michel Callon and Daniel Miller to explore tensions within economic sociology and anthropology.The tension is between characterizations of markets and economic rationality that seem to dissolve them into a generalized notion of culture and those which seem to abstract them as specific social forms. The paper argues that markets are best defined in terms of a form of transaction rather than a specific mode of cal…
Introduction: The Technological Economy
This article is an overview of Michel Callon's contribution to the reformulation of economic sociology and anthropology. It contextualizes Callon's concepts within science and technology studies, and indicates the main lines of influence on his thinking about economic processes. Callon's work also opens up a number of debates and challenges to current perspectives within economic sociology. Finally, the article considers the way in which Callon's…
Technology, politics and the market: An interview with Michel Callon
2002). Technology, politics and the market: an interview with Michel Callon. Economy and Society: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 285-306
Etnografia on e off-line: Cibercafés em Trinidad
O presente artigo questiona pressupostos sobre a distinção, comum na pesquisa de Internet, entre on-line e off-line. Várias pesquisas presumiram a "virtualidade", bem como uma forte divisão entre o on-line e o off-line como sendo um dado e um ponto de partida metodológico e analítico em pesquisa. Argumentamos que quando se aborda o uso de fato da Internet a partir de uma abordagem etnográfica, uma tal distinção se revela como um feito social alta…
How the World Changed Social Media
How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we b…
Making Things Real
If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings (such as, in this case, an Internet setting) which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as 'things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material ('sexpics') and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The paper argues that although, or because…
Trading Sexpics on IRC: Embodiment and Authenticity on the Internet
Cyberspace, the internet and vituality are widely understood in terms of poststructuralist or antiessentialist expectations that when identity is separated from physical bodies it is experienced as self-evidently performative: we might therefore expect that new kinds of identities will be enacted on-line, and that participants will frame these identities as performances rather than judging them in terms of their truth or authenticity. This articl…
Reassembling the Cultural: Fashion models, brands and the meaning of ‘culture’ after ANT
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, s…
Sex and Sociality: Comparative Ethnographies of Sexual Objectification
This article is intended as a critique of recent theorizations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers (in particular Georges Bataille) are confronted with field data on …
Moments and Movements in the Study of Consumer Culture: A discussion between Daniel Miller and Don Slater
Message Variability and Heterogeneity: A Core Challenge for Communication Research
Messages are central to human social experience, and pose key conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of communication. In response to these challenges, we outline a systematic approach to conceptualizing, operationalizing, and analyzing messages. At the conceptual level, we distinguish between two core aspects of messages: message variability (the defined and operationalized features of messages) and message heterogeneity (the unde…
Making space for 'the social: Connecting Sociology and Professional Practices in Urban Lighting Design
Lighting is increasingly recognized as a significant social intervention by both lighting professionals and academic social scientists. However, what counts as 'the social' is diverse and contested, with consequences for what kind of 'social' is performed or invented. Based on a long-term research programme, we argue that collaboration between sociologists and lighting professionals requires negotiating discourses and practices of 'the social'. T…
Critical and Moral Stances in Consumer Studies
Making Things Real: Ethics and Order on the Internet
If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings (such as, in this case, an Internet setting) which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as `things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material (`sexpics') and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The paper argues that although, or because…
Strategic ambiguity: A Roundtable on Cultural Economy and Consumer Culture
This lightly edited transcript records the discussion at the opening roundtable of the What Was Cultural Economy? symposium at City, University of London in January 2020. In it, Don Slater, Sean Nixon and Liz McFall, all participants in the original ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy' reflect on the conceptual and institutional history of ‘cultural economy’ and how it intersected with their shared interests in advertising and consumer culture. Their i…
On the wings of the sign: Commodity culture and social practice
The Exeter Book ( Codex Exoniensis )
On the wings of the sign: Commodity culture and social practice
Trading Sexpics on IRC: Embodiment and Authenticity on the Internet
Cyberspace, the internet and vituality are widely understood in terms of poststructuralist or antiessentialist expectations that when identity is separated from physical bodies it is experienced as self-evidently performative: we might therefore expect that new kinds of identities will be enacted on-line, and that participants will frame these identities as performances rather than judging them in terms of their truth or authenticity. This articl…
Sex and Sociality: Comparative Ethnographies of Sexual Objectification
This article is intended as a critique of recent theorizations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers (in particular Georges Bataille) are confronted with field data on …
In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music , by A. McRobbie
(2000). In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music, by A. McRobbie. Fashion Theory: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 201-203
The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach
This path breaking book is the first to provide a rigorous and comprehensive examination of Internet culture and consumption. A rich ethnography of Internet use, the book offers a sustained account not just of being online, but of the social, political and cultural contexts which account for the contemporary Internet experience. From cyber cafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Intern…
Existentialism with an Historical Imagination: A round-table discussion with Agnes Heller and Marshall Berman
Technology, politics and the market: An interview with Michel Callon
2002). Technology, politics and the market: an interview with Michel Callon. Economy and Society: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 285-306
Making Things Real
If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings (such as, in this case, an Internet setting) which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as 'things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material ('sexpics') and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The paper argues that although, or because…
Making Things Real: Ethics and Order on the Internet
If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings (such as, in this case, an Internet setting) which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as `things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material (`sexpics') and communications over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The paper argues that although, or because…
From calculation to alienation: Disentangling Economic Abstractions
This article uses a debate between Michel Callon and Daniel Miller to explore tensions within economic sociology and anthropology.The tension is between characterizations of markets and economic rationality that seem to dissolve them into a generalized notion of culture and those which seem to abstract them as specific social forms. The paper argues that markets are best defined in terms of a form of transaction rather than a specific mode of cal…
Introduction: The Technological Economy
This article is an overview of Michel Callon's contribution to the reformulation of economic sociology and anthropology. It contextualizes Callon's concepts within science and technology studies, and indicates the main lines of influence on his thinking about economic processes. Callon's work also opens up a number of debates and challenges to current perspectives within economic sociology. Finally, the article considers the way in which Callon's…
Etnografia on e off-line: Cibercafés em Trinidad
O presente artigo questiona pressupostos sobre a distinção, comum na pesquisa de Internet, entre on-line e off-line. Várias pesquisas presumiram a "virtualidade", bem como uma forte divisão entre o on-line e o off-line como sendo um dado e um ponto de partida metodológico e analítico em pesquisa. Argumentamos que quando se aborda o uso de fato da Internet a partir de uma abordagem etnográfica, uma tal distinção se revela como um feito social alta…
Moments and Movements in the Study of Consumer Culture: A discussion between Daniel Miller and Don Slater
Critical and Moral Stances in Consumer Studies
Reassembling the Cultural: Fashion models, brands and the meaning of ‘culture’ after ANT
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, s…
Message Variability and Heterogeneity: A Core Challenge for Communication Research
Messages are central to human social experience, and pose key conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of communication. In response to these challenges, we outline a systematic approach to conceptualizing, operationalizing, and analyzing messages. At the conceptual level, we distinguish between two core aspects of messages: message variability (the defined and operationalized features of messages) and message heterogeneity (the unde…
How the World Changed Social Media
How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we b…
Markets, materiality and the ‘new economy’
The contemporary 'cultural turn' in thinking about economic processes has been deeply bound up with narratives of 'dematerialisation'. This chapter argues that characterisations of 'new economy' are based on the idea of dematerialisation are problematic because the distinction on which they are based misrepresents the issue of materiality. 'Dematerialisation', however, rests on a dubious distinction that has plagued much social theory: the distin…
Making space for 'the social: Connecting Sociology and Professional Practices in Urban Lighting Design
Lighting is increasingly recognized as a significant social intervention by both lighting professionals and academic social scientists. However, what counts as 'the social' is diverse and contested, with consequences for what kind of 'social' is performed or invented. Based on a long-term research programme, we argue that collaboration between sociologists and lighting professionals requires negotiating discourses and practices of 'the social'. T…
Democracy, Development and Industrial Policy in Nigeria: A Historical Contextualisation
The article places Nigeria’s political and economic challenges in historical and global context. As opposed to viewing democracy or development emerging simply as the ‘will of the people’ or ‘political will’, it encourages a historical and structural view of the phenomena. Sustained democratic institutions and intensive economic growth emerge under particular conditions where the continued maintenance of hegemony and gate-keeping extractive state…
Strategic ambiguity: A Roundtable on Cultural Economy and Consumer Culture
This lightly edited transcript records the discussion at the opening roundtable of the What Was Cultural Economy? symposium at City, University of London in January 2020. In it, Don Slater, Sean Nixon and Liz McFall, all participants in the original ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy' reflect on the conceptual and institutional history of ‘cultural economy’ and how it intersected with their shared interests in advertising and consumer culture. Their i…
Challenging but worth it: The purpose of participatory research in urban health, an evaluation and derived framework
Symposium on ‘Do ethnographers make markets?’
This special issue has been a truly collective inquiry. It began with a simple intuition: the fact that social researchers, who normally study how practitioners make markets, are invited to collaborate in market interventions is something worth thinking about. Those who contributed with their articles generously agreed to work with this premise (Björklund Larsen Citation2023; Geiger and Gross Citation2022; Onto and Fernandes Citation2025; Ossandó…
Sociology (15 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Economics (6 works)