BIO

Koray Caliskan is an Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons, The New School and Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy, and an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He received his Ph.D. with distinction from NYU’s Politics Department, with which he won the Malcolm Kerr Social Science Award from MESA. His book Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity came out from Princeton University Press and focused on global commodity markets and relations of economization. He is a co-founder of mamame.com.tr, a social innovation project bringing together the organizational form of cooperative and limited liability company in economizing under-represented women’s labor, which won the Entrepreneurship of the Year Award in 2017 from Microsoft Turkey. He directed, produced, and wrote various fiction and documentary films, including Esma, shown at Cannes Film Festival, and In Flames (Yangın Var) an award-winning romantic road comedy on the Kurdish question in Turkey. His current research project on cryptocurrencies was selected to be a winner of the Scientific Breakthrough of the Year Award in Social Sciences and Humanities by the Falling Walls Foundation in 2021. His next book, based on this research, Data Money: Cryptocurrencies and their Communities, Markets and Blockchains will come out in 2023 from Columbia University Press and tells the story of how global cryptocurrency markets work, how cryptocurrency communities make these new monies, and how blockchains account for their new financial relations. Currently, on an ESRC grant, he is carrying out a collaborative research on the economic sociology of digital advertisements. Together with Matt Wade, he founded a strategic design studio in London and New York City, The Wᴙong Department that uses DARN strategic design methodology to prototype, test and deploy strategic design interventions in complex contexts and organizations by bringing together social sciences and design process. He lives in Brooklyn.