Dr Don Slater

Don Slater’s work focuses on material culture and technologies in everyday life, an interest he has pursued through several empirical lenses: consumption and consumer culture; photography and visual culture; new media technologies and digital culture (particularly in the global south and development contexts).

For the past 15 years he has focused this interest on a new dimension of material culture and technology: light and lighting as core infrastructures of urban life. He is founder and co-director of the Configuring Light research group with Joanne Entwistle (Kings College London) and Elettra Bordonaro (LSE/LightFollowsBehaviour design group) (www.configuringlight.org).

Don's current research programme, Configuring Light/Staging the Social (co-directed with Dr Joanne Entwistle, King’s College London and Dr Elettra Bordonaro, LSE/LightFollowsBehaviour) explores the ways in which light, as a material, is configured into urban and public realm infrastructures, spaces and practices, and has a core concern with the ways in which sociologists and designers can collaborate in configuring material culture. Details of this programme can be found at www.configuringlight.org. Configuring Light has developed many projects since being formed in 2013, including a three year ESRC seminar series; a programme of seven iGuzzini Social Lightscapes workshops with lighting professionals to explore site-based dialogues between social research and design; and research projects in Colombia, Paris, London and Derby. Major recent projects include: four-year Horizon 2020 study of the impact of lighting on the health and well-being of elderly people focused on social, spatial and design research in Amsterdam, Bologna and Tartu; an assessment of lighting and gender safety in the Olympic Park; a lighting workshop for Asian-based lighting professionals in Bangkon.
The 15 years before this were dominated by new media research, culminating in New Media, Development and Globalization: Making Connections in the Global South (Polity: 2013). Previous work has included The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, with Prof Daniel Miller (Berg: 2000); a study of on-line pornography traders; 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); 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).
Research on the sociology of economic life includes Consumer Culture and Modernity (Polity: 1997); Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Thought, with Dr Fran Tonkiss (Polity: 2001); and The Technological Economy, with Dr Andrew Barry (Routledge 2005).

Don is part of the Knowledge, Culture and Technology research cluster.