The 9th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop will take place in Limerick, Ireland.
Designing Markets/Market Designs
University of Limerick | 2nd-4th June 2027
Co-Chairs: Dr Annmarie Ryan & Prof Susi Geiger
Markets are not only analysed, governed, or criticised, they are continuously assembled, formatted, and stabilised through acts of design. Design formats how markets are sensed, navigated, and valued, shaping tastes, attachments, and futures (Latour, 2008; Verganti, 2009). Platforms exemplify this: not mere markets, but stacked economization processes in which multiple modes of valuation are layered, connected, and governed through deliberate digital-material design (Caliskan, MacKenzie & Callon, 2024). Markets are also deliberately engineered through infrastructures, policy instruments, experiments, and regulatory devices, often with profound distributive and political consequences (Callon & Roth, 2021; Geiger, 2024; Pallesen et al., 2024). At the same time, market studies itself is performative, as methods, concepts, and visualisations participate in the realities they claim to study (Callon, 1998). Researchers have started to explore how such interventions may be expressed in terms of care for the markets we study (Geiger and Loza 2025). IMSW27 aims to foreground design not only as an object of analysis, but as a mode of market intervention and a way of knowing – and caring.
But what does it really mean to say that markets are designed? If market making involves multi-actor efforts of creating a market organization through socio-material assemblages directed toward certain goals (Geiger, 2024), then market design foregrounds the deliberate assembling of actors, devices, rules, and representations to format behaviours and afford particular outcomes. However, while economics and strategy often frame market design as engineering or orchestration, contemporary design studies emphasise uncertainty, iteration, distributed agency, and the impossibility of full control. IMSW27 invites scholars to explore how different imaginaries of market design, be it engineering, shaping, or experimentation, carry distinct assumptions about agency, control, and uncertainty.
We invite contributions to explore these and related themes, including: treatments of design as a site of struggle over value, power, and what futures are desirable (Roscoe, 2026; Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2024); that interrogate the promises and dangers of designification and solutionism (Navarro Aguiar & Palmås, 2025); and that experiment with design as an epistemic practice, through making, staging, speculation, and collective inquiry (Nelson & Stolterman, 2014; Windahl & Mason, 2024). As such we welcome papers that take seriously the design of markets, but also its limits (Geiger, 2024). We welcome multiple formats: traditional papers, but also workshops and other making-and-doing contributions. Proposers of non-paper formats are encouraged to engage directly with the co-chairs to co-design sessions that push market studies beyond critique toward more reflexive, accountable forms of intervention.
We look forward to welcoming you to Limerick, Ireland. Plans are already well underway for an exciting social and cultural programme along with novel workshop ideas in market studies pedagogy and design workshops. There is still lots of time to propose ideas for sessions/workshops. Please do get in touch with Annmarie (annmarie.ryan@ul.ie) or Susi (susi.geiger@ucd.ie).
So, save the date & start designing your intervention!
IMSW was founded in 2010 and is now the primary gathering place for academics interested in the social studies of markets from fields as diverse as science and technology studies, sociology, organisation studies, marketing, information systems, political science, history, anthropology, and geography.
The Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE) was established in 2008 as an outlet for research exploring the role material cultural practices play in organising economies, markets, and societies, and is now an essential platform for inter, cross, and transdisciplinary studies of all things economic. The constituencies of IMSW and the JCE have always naturally overlapped.
Previously:
8th at Stockholm (Sweden, 2025)
7th IMSW at Edinburgh (Scotland, 2023)
6th IMSW at Grenoble (France, 2021)
5th IMSW at Copenhagen (Denmark, 2018)
4th IMSW at St Andrews (Scotland, 2016)
3rd IMSW at Saint Maximin (France, 2014)
2nd IMSW at Dublin (Ireland, 2012)
1st IMSW at Sigtuna (Sweden, 2010)
