Hybrid drug markets: Why integrated methodological approaches are needed

No registration is required for this seminar.

Hybrid drug markets are best understood as socio-technical assemblages operating along a digital-physical continuum, where online platforms, face-to-face interactions, and social relations are mutually constitutive. Challenging online/offline dualisms, research shows that illicit exchanges remain embedded in social networks, trust relations, and cultural practices, aligning with economic sociology’s emphasis on markets as relational and socially embedded. 

This talk illustrates these developments through two ongoing research projects. The first analyses darknet markets as adaptive infrastructures for the distribution of highly potent synthetic opioids across Europe, drawing on longitudinal digital trace data to examine supply dynamics and public health risks. The second employs qualitative interviews to investigate gendered drug acquisition practices in Vienna, highlighting how hybrid environments reproduce inequalities in access, risk, and harm reduction.

Biography

Meropi Tzanetakis is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Social Research at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. She is PI of the Austrian Science Fund project ‘A Socio-Technical Framework for Online Drug Markets’. Meropi’s research explores how illegal markets are embedded within society and the broader economy. Her work forms part of a wider research agenda examining the transformation of markets through processes of digitalisation. Specifically, she investigates the socio-technical embeddedness of illicit markets across global, national, and local contexts, with a focus on how platform business models and emerging technologies such as AI reshape social practices, trust relations, and governance.

Organiser

David Wästerfors, Professor at the Department of Sociology

Welcome on April 9th!

Arranged by Lund Social Science Methods Centre