DR. DON SLATER

Don Slater joined the LSE as a Reader in Sociology in January 2001. After taking his BA and Ph.D from Cambridge (Social and Political Sciences) and spending several years in publishing, photography and community arts, he taught in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, from 1987 till 2001.

Don Slater's work focuses on the relations between culture and economy, and falls into three broad areas: the sociology of economic life (in particular, consumer culture and market society); the sociology of the Internet and new media; and visual sociology (particularly photography and advertising). This work has been informed by a commitment to empirical (particularly ethnographic) research, to historical research, to critical traditions within modern social theory, and to interdisciplinary study and collaboration.
His work on sociology of economic life includes Consumer Culture and Modernity (Polity: 1997) and Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Thought, with Dr Fran Tonkiss (Polity: 2001); and, The Technological Economy, with Dr Andrew Barry (Routledge 2005).

Don Slater's Internet research has focused on ethnographic approaches to the new media, and has so far included an ethnography of Internet use in Trinidad - The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, with Prof Daniel Miller (Berg: 2000); and a study of on-line pornography traders.  He conducted an ethnography of community radio and internet in rural Sri Lanka (with Peter Lewis, LSE, and Jo Tacchi, QUT, under the auspices of UNESCO and DfID), which has been followed by a UNESCO programme of ethnographic action research with nine ICT projects in South Asia, and a two-year DfID-funded programme of comparative ethnographies of new media in India, Ghana, South Africa and Jamaica (with Daniel Miller, Jo Tacchi and Andrew Skuse).

His work on visual sociology has been particularly concerned with the relationship of photography to science, commerce and modernity, and its status as a domestic social practice.

Don Slater supervises graduate students in all of these areas. Ph.Ds in progress include economic understandings in virtual worlds; Korean advertising and globalization; the ethics of consumption; art markets and entrepreneurship in Montreal; political agency and conspiracy theories online.