Professor Sharon Zukin
Professor Emerita of Sociology and of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Sharon Zukin is Professor Emerita of Sociology and of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and writes about urban, cultural and economic change.
Not a New Yorker by birth, she has tried for years to explain how her adopted city has changed both structurally and experientially during the time she has lived here, beginning with Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (1982) and The Cultures of Cities (1995), through Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (2010) and The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy (2020).
She wrote a book about the culture of shopping when brick and mortar was still a thing (Point of Purchase, 2004), led a transnational research project on globalization and gentrification on local shopping streets (Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, 2016), and has won the C. Wright Mills Award for her book Landscapes of Power (1991), the Jane Jacobs Award for Naked City, and the Lynd Award for career achievement in urban sociology.
Lana Swartz
Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia
Most of Lana's research is about money and other communication technologies. Her book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media, was released by Yale University Press in 2020. Her book, co-edited with Bill Mauer, Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff was published by MIT Press in 2017.
She has recently published on the Covid-19 economy (particularly the United States' CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program), scams (particularly in cryptocurrency, but also in the digital economy in general), and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC, particularly asking whether or not it might serve as a public interest money form).
She was a 2020-21 Berggruen Fellow, 2021 Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (sadly remote), and 2020-21 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Previously, she was a postdoctroal researcher at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Michel Callon
Michel Callon is a leading social scientist whose work has enlarged and transformed the field of economic sociology. He has worked as Professor of Sociology at the École des Mines de Paris, served as the Director of the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) from 1982 to 1994 at the same university, and assumed the position of the Chairman of the 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) from 1998-1999.
A CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) Silver Award winner, he proposed Actor-Network in 1980s, now one of the most deployed scientific concepts of our times and has contributed with Bruno Latour and John Law, to the emergence, development and critique of Actor-Network Theory.
His oeuvre covers a wide spectrum of concerns such as the anthropology of science and technology, theories of innovation, and anthropology and sociology of economies and markets. Continuing to carry out research and writing as an Honorary Member of CSI, he proposed a new theory of markets in his most recent book, Markets in the Making. This alternative approach, the Agencement Model, invites researchers to study marketisation as a never-ending process. Currently, he works on economic platforms as a new mode of economisation.
Professor Michel Callon will address the conference in a pre-recorded conversation with Koray Caliskan.
Professor Pierre-Benoît Joly
Professor Pierre-Benoît Joly, Director of Research at the Institute for Research and Innovation in Society
Pierre-Benoît Joly, a STS scholar, is Directeur de recherche at the National Institute of Research for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) in France. He has been the Director of the IFRIS and of Labex (Laboratory of Excellence) SITES from 2009 to 2014, and the founding director of LISIS, a research Unit based at Université Paris Est from 2015 to 2019. Since January 2020, he is the Chair of the INRAE Center Occitanie-Toulouse.
His research is devoted to the study of co-production of knowledge and social order. Drawing on a number of empirical studies on the interactions between science, democracy and the market, the aim is to analyze the contemporary transformations of scientific public sphere and new modes of governance of innovation and risk. Most recently, he has focused on the study of the economy of technoscientific promises and on the transformations of innovation processes and innovation policies.
Joly has published six books, coordinated four special issues of journals and more than 120 articles or book chapters. He has lectured in various higher education organization, including the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Sciences Po. He is a member of the French Academy of Agriculture, and of the French Academy of Technology.
