Profile
Koray Caliskan is an economic sociologist and organizational designer. He is a tenured faculty member at the School of Design Strategies, teaching in the Strategic Design and Management graduate program at Parsons. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Design Strategies and Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy. Caliskan designed the strategy for MaMame, a social innovation project that supports underrepresented women’s labor—an initiative that received Microsoft’s Entrepreneurship of the Year Award in 2017. He has directed and produced several award-winning fiction and documentary films, including Esma, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. He is also a co-founder of The Wrong Department, a strategic design studio with offices in London and New York City. His recent research on cryptocurrencies earned the Scientific Breakthrough of the Year Award in Social Sciences from the Falling Walls Foundation in 2021 and was highlighted in the Financial Times as offering new insights into the US economy. This research culminated in his book Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies and Their Communities, Blockchains, and Markets, published by Columbia University Press in September 2023. Currently, with support from an ESRC (UK) grant, Caliskan is researching the economic sociology of online advertisements. In 2025, he will publish two co-authored books: Economization: Markets, Platforms, and Ecologies (with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, Columbia University Press) and Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics (with Donald MacKenzie, Polity Press).
Degrees Held
Ph.D. 2005. Politics, NYU, New York
MA. 1999. Politics, NYU, New York.
Certificate. 2001. Commodity Options and Futures Trading, Rhodes College, Memphis.
BA. 1995. Political Science, Bogazici University, Istanbul.
Professional Affiliation
American Sociological Association, ASA
Design Research Society
Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, SASE
Association for Social Economics, ASE
Middle Eastern Studies Association, MESA
American Anthropological Association, AAA
European Group for Organization Studies, EGOS
Recent Publications
Books:
Forthcoming in 2025 (with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie) Economization: Economies, Markets, Platforms, and Ecologies New York: Columbia University Press.
Forthcoming in 2025 (with Donald MacKenzie) Inside Digital Advertising: Platform Power, Data Icebergs, and Material Politics. Polity Press.
2023 Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies and their Markets, Communities and Blockchains, New York: Columbia University Press.
2011 Market Threads: How Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Peer-Reviewed and Indexed Academic Articles: (Last 4 years only)
(Forthcoming in 2025) (with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie). Ecologization, Part 2: Practices, Strategies and Devices for Managing Asset-Actifs. Economy and Society, Vol 54(3).
2025. The Modes and Types of Performativity: A Meta-Theoretical Review (with Sevde N. Unal, Simone Polillo, and Donald MacKenzie). Finance and Society. Published online 2025:1-24. doi:10.1017/fas.2025.11
2025 (with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie). Ecologization, part 1: Towards assets-actifs and care practices. Economy and Society, 54(2), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2025.2488121
2025 (with Donald MacKenzie and Addie McGowan) Prodexchange: Digital-Industrial Economization in Google Search Supply Chain, Platforms and Society, Volume 2: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768624251337868
2024 (with Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie). Stacked economization: a research program for the study of platforms. Journal of Cultural Economy, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2024.2423687
2024. (with Michel Callon, Paul Langley, Bill Maurer, Timothy Mitchell, Alvin Roth). Review Symposium: Michel Callon's Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation. Journal of Cultural Economy, 28 October. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2024.2413105
2024. (with Addie McGowan and Donald MacKenzie) Intermediaries, Mediators and Digital Advertising’s Tensions. Journal of Cultural Economy, 15 July. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2024.2360919
2023. (with Charlotte Rommerskirchen and Donald MacKenzie). Strange Bedfellows: Consumer protection and competition policy in the making of the EU privacy Regime. Journal of Common Market Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13552
2023. (with Donald MacKenzie and Charlotte Rommerskirchen) Header Bidding: ‘Systems’, ‘Gatherings’ and the Material Politics of Market Structure in Online Advertising, Economy and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2238463
2022. (with Matt Wade) DARN Part 1: What is Strategic Design? Social Theory and Intangible Design in Perspective, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Vol. 8, Iss. 3, Autumn 2022, pp. 299-318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.10.001
2022. (with Matt Wade) DARN Part 2: An Evidence-Based Research and Prototyping Method for Strategic Design, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, Vol. 8, Iss. 3, Autumn 2022, pp. 319-335. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.11.002
2022. (with Peter Karnoe and Julia Kirkegaard) Introducing the Lens of Markets-in-the-Making to Transition Studies: The Case of the Danish Wind Power Market Agencement. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, Vol. 44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2022.05.003
2022. (with Michael Lounsbury) Entrepreneurialism as Discourse: Towards a Critical Research Agenda, Research in Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 72. Volume 81, pp. 43–53. doi:10.1108/S0733-558X20220000081003
2022. The Elephant in the Dark: A New Framework for Cryptocurrency Taxation and Exchange Platform Regulation in the US. Journal of Risk Financial Management. Vol. 15, Iss. 3, pp. 1-18, https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm15030118.
2022. The Rise and Fall of Electra: A Cryptocurrency Community in Perspective, Review of Social Economy, Vol 79, Iss. 4, 1-25, https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764.2022.2039404
2021. Data Money Makers: An Ethnographic Analysis of a Global Cryptocurrency Community, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol 73, 168-187. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12916
2021. Platform Works as Stack Economization: Cryptocurrency Markets and Exchanges in Perspective, Sociologica: International Journal for Sociological Debate, Vol. 14, Iss. 3, pp. 115-42. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11746
Curation
2024. Good Interventions: An Economic and Strategic Design Exhibition’24, Parsons School of Design, The New School.
2023. Good Interventions: An Economic and Strategic Design Exhibition'23, Parsons School of Design, The New School.
2022. Good Interventions: An Economic and Strategic Design Exhibition'22, Parsons School of Design, The New School.
Data Sets
2021 (with Enis Simsar) Twitter Interaction Data of Electra Cryptocurrency Community's Twitter Handle Followers and A Code for Follower Interaction Analysis. GitHub Repository https://github.com/enisimsar/DataMoney https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4618865
2020 (with Ilker Birbil). Terms of Service Agreements of 251 Cryptocurrency Exchanges Representing 99.99% of Centralized Data Money Transactions. GitHub Repository https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4126569
2020 (with Ilker Birbil). The White Papers of Most Valuable 100 Cryptocurrencies. GitHub Repository https://github.com/sibirbil/DataMoney https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4126559
Performances and Appearances
How to make and destroy a cryptocurrency?
http://sds.parsons.edu/designmanagement/6616-2/
Economies are Designed, so they be redesigned:
https://platform.coop/stories/koray-caliskan-the-new-school-bogazici-university/
Coindesk TV Interview on 'Witnessing a New Money Material.'
https://www.coindesk.com/video/author-on-crypto-we-are-witnessing-a-new-money-material/
Research Interests
Online Advertisement
Design as Social Science Method
Markets and Platforms
Organizational Design
Awards And Honors
2021 Winner. Scientific Breakthroughs of the Year Award in Social Sciences and Humanities. The Falling Walls Foundation
2021 Social and Economic Research Council Grant, UK. (720.000 USD with two team members).
2018 Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies Fellowship, NSSR.
2018 Short listed for the Georg-Forster Award, Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung
2018 Chancellor's Fellowship. University of Edinburgh, (Declined)
2017 The Entrepreneurship of the Year Award, for mamame.com.tr Microsoft Corp, Kagider, Turkey.
2015 Academic Achievement Award, Bogazici University, Rector’s Office
2006 Outstanding Teaching Award, Bogazici University, Rector’s Office
2005 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in Social Sciences, Middle East Studies Association of North America
2005 New York University, Graduation with Distinction Certificate.
Portfolio
Esma, Short Film, 18:00, Director, Writer
In Flames, Feature Film, 100:00, Producer, Co-Writer
Last Villagers of Avshar, 45:00, Documentary, Director
Pipelines Made up of Donkeys, 45:00 Documentary, Producer, Al Jazeera
Republic of Wonderland: Turkish TV Series in the World, Documentary, 240:00 (4 Parts), Producer