Allister (Pilar) Plater is a doctoral student in sociology at University of Virginia. She received her master’s degree in educational studies from Tufts University and bachelor’s in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a first-year doctoral student, Pilar became a Southern Regional Education Board Doctoral scholar. She later participated in the University of Chicago Ethnography Incubator as a fellow and is currently an American Association of University Women Dissertation Awardee. Plater’s research agenda builds on three pillars of inquiry: work, consumption, and inequality. Her work focuses on understanding and synthesizing social meanings of money, workplace culture, industry ethos, and how culture flows through market transactions. In 2019, Plater interned as a global workplace researcher at NIKE World Headquarters in Portland, Oregon. During that period, she conducted two qualitative projects that culminated in six presentations to the company and beyond. She made data-driven recommendations for strategies to redesign the physical work space to recruit and retain employees of the future.
