Don Slater

• PhD
• Reader at London School of Economics and Political Science

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 econ...

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 soci...

The paper argues that ambiguity is not a property of objects but of the relationships of things to classifications and practices. Ambiguity is considered at two levels: firstly, the capacity of things to be subsumed within multiple but equally valid orders, and secondly, the capacity of social actors to articulate and act upon diverse beliefs about...

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 asp...

New media, development and globalization are the key terms through which the future is being imagined and performed in governance, development initiatives and public and political discourse. Yet these authoritative terms have arisen within particular cultural and ideological contexts. In using them, we risk promoting over-generalized and seemingly...

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 asp...

This chapter argues that marketing has been rendered "impossible" by fundamental divisions of intellectual labor between economic and cultural theory: whereas economics expelled all cultural logics in its analysis of formal rationality, cultural disciplines have focused on marketing as ideology and meaning, thus ignoring marketing as commercial pra...

This article interrogates assumptions about the on-line/off-line distinction in internet research. Much research has presumed "virtuality" and a strong division between the on-line and the off-line as a methodological and analytical given and starting point for research. We argue that when actual internet use is approached from an ethnographic pers...

The publication presents comparative research findings of local initiatives spread across a series of sites in South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India. The sites include a range of community media and use information and communication technologies (ICTs) as part of efforts to reduce poverty.

The unnamed authors of this handbook are the researchers attached to UNESCO's ICT and poverty reduction projects in South Asia. Without their hard work and input this method would not have been developed and this handbook would not have been written.

If asked, most people would agree that there are deep connections between technology and the modern world, and even that technology is the truly distinctive feature of modernity. Until recently, however, there has been surprisingly little overlap between technology studies and modernity theory. The goal of this ambitious book is to lay the foundati...

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 (`sex...

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 ('sex...

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 curr...

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 argue...

This report presents the findings of pilot research to explore new methodological approaches to monitoring and evaluating community multi-media centres (CMCs) in the context of development and poverty reduction. The research was originally commissioned by UNESCO’s Adviser for Communication and Information for Asia, Mr Wijayananda Jayaweera, and was...

Mediated Politics explores the changing media environments in contemporary democracy: the internet, the decline of network news and the daily newspaper; the growing tendency to treat election campaigns as competing product advertisements; the blurring lines between news, ads, and entertainment. By combining new developments in political communicati...

Cyberspace, the internet and virtuality are widely understood in terms of poststructuralist or anti-essentialist 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 id...

This paper is intended as a critique of recent theorisations 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 o...