This soirée features two talks by Prof. Koray Çalışkan (Parsons School of Design, The New School) & Prof. Nicole Gurran (The University of Sydney) with Prof. Ashley Mears (Professor and Chair of Cultural Sociology and New Media, UvA) as discussant. 

Prof. Çalışkan's talk on 'The Glorious Return of Barter: Inside Digital Video Advertising' examines how digital video advertising economies are produced and maintained across platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Meta, and Netflix. Drawing on a four-year, multi-method research carried out with Donald MacKenzie, it analyzes how impressions are assembled, stabilized, and monetized within a computational supply chain. The talk shows that video platforms are not simply multi-sided markets but stacked economization processes. At the base lies barter, where viewers exchange attention, behavioral data, and cognitive labor for access and entertainment. To name the objects exchanged in these asymmetric relations, the paper introduces dyads—paired valuables (such as data vs entertainment) that supply the raw materials for advertising markets. Built on this foundation, marketization transforms fleeting attention into measurable, comparable, and tradable impressions through technical rules, visibility thresholds, and device-level constraints. The talk concludes that digital video advertising is best understood as a set of stacked-economization platforms organizing contemporary visibility, with significant regulatory and environmental consequences.

Prof. Gurran will be speaking on 'Understanding platform mediated shared rental markets in Australia'. The talk will examine Australia’s housing affordability crisis and how this has forced many people to seek share accommodation via online platforms, even late into adulthood. This presentation examines this trend in Australia’s most expensive three cities: Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Analysing advertisements placed on dominant platform ‘Flatmates.com.au’ by people seeking or offering shared accommodation between 2021-2023, clear patterns appear in the supply of, and demand for, share accommodation across the three cities. The analysis shows clear parallels with rental vacancies and prices in the conventional market, showing rising demand for share accommodation in response to constrained supply and or rising rents. This suggests that share housing should be understood as a distinct segment of the wider rental market, despite serious concerns about the safety and cost of share accommodation for vulnerable groups such as older women and families with children. Australia’s failure to supply sufficient affordable and secure housing for lower income groups, combined with inadequate rental protections for renters, has left vulnerable groups open to precarious arrangements facilitated by online platforms.  The Australian case therefore serves as a cautionary tale for other countries experiencing rising affordability pressures and inadequate regulatory oversight of new housing market practices.

Date: Thursday 29 January 2026
Time: 17:00-21:00 (reception from 19:30 onwards)
Location: Kapitein Zeppos (Gebed Zonder End 5, 1012 HS Amsterdam)

The talk will be followed by a buffet reception, please RSVP using the link below or send an email to gdc@uva.nl 

About the speakers

Koray Çalışkan is a tenured professor teaching economic sociology and design at Parsons School of Design, The New School. His research focuses on markets, AI economies, digital platforms, and online advertising. He is the author of Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity (Princeton UP) and Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies, Their Communities, Markets, and Blockchains (Columbia UP); co-author (with Donald MacKenzie) of Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics (Polity); and (with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie) of Economization: Markets, Platforms and Ecologies (forthcoming from Columbia UP).

Nicole Gurran's research focuses on comparative urban planning systems and approaches to housing and ecological sustainability. She has led and collaborated on a series of research projects on aspects of urban policy, housing, sustainability and planning, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Urban and Housing Research Institute (AHURI), as well as state and local government. Professor Gurran has authored and co-authored numerous publications and books including Urban Planning and the Housing Market: International Perspectives for Policy and Practicewith Glen Bramley(Palgrave Macmillan 2017),Politics, Planning and Housing Supply in Australia, England and Hong Kong(Routledge, July 2016) , and Australian Urban Land Use Planning: Principles, Policy, and Practice(Sydney University Press 2011, 2007).

About the discussant

Ashley Mears is Professor and Chair of Cultural Sociology and New Media at the University of Amsterdam. She works primarily at the intersections of economic and cultural sociology and gender, and how societies value people and things.  She researches value and exchange in the context of labor, beauty, free stuff, elites, consumption, and social media, and has written on theory and qualitative methods.  Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Le Monde, The Economist, NPR, the BBC, and Chinese Cosmo.