[Commlist] CFP: Tech/Money Collected Volume

Call for Proposals: Tech/Money Collected Volume

Co-editors: M.R. Sauter, M.C. Forelle, Caroline Jack

*Deadline for proposals*: 6 January 2026

We are seeking chapter proposals for a proposed collected volume on the 
theme of Tech/Money.

Our goal with this volume is to highlight a materialist, political 
economy approach to science and technology studies with work that 
emphasizes an understanding of the role played by money, financing, and 
business structures in the study of technology and science. This work 
moves beyond an economic analysis, highlighting the role of capital and 
finance’s movements, norms, and infrastructures in animating science and 
technology, inflecting and directing the performance of these spaces and 
their own ideologies, imaginaries, and infrastructures. The papers we 
seek to include in this volume examine the constitutive nature of money, 
finance, funding, and business models in the development of technologies 
and technosocial/technopolitical landscapes. Sub-themes include: 
temporalities of money, finance, and speculation (including sales and 
fundraising pitches); imaginaries of risk, particularly financialized 
risk; the role of the frontier (geographic, political, intellectual) in 
the technocapitalist imaginary and its influence on the practices of 
firms; the connected lives of money, innovation, and science; and the 
social meanings of money and markets in science. Dealing 
unapologetically with ways in which the global logics of technocapital 
are often chewed up, altered, and digested by the specificities of the 
local context provides an opportunity to examine the tensions of 
resistance, collaboration, collusion, adaptation, and imitations, and 
enmeshment that often accompany these projects. We invite contributions 
that ground theoretical insight in empirical or archival work and that 
bridge STS, communication, and media studies to illuminate how capital, 
finance, and technoscience mutually constitute one another.

This volume draws inspiration from two overlapping traditions that have 
examined the entanglements of finance, technology, and knowledge 
production. Within science and technology studies, scholars of the 
so-called “financial turn”—notably Donald MacKenzie (2006) and Michel 
Callon (2021)—adapted the analytical tools of STS to financial markets, 
tracing how epistemic cultures, modeling practices, and publics were 
constructed through technical systems of valuation and exchange. 
Subsequent work expanded this analysis to a range of financial and 
economic lifeworlds: the epistemology of the “national economy” and GDP 
(Murphy, 2017); currency and techno-monetary systems (Swartz, 2017, 
2020); the sociology and materiality of financial markets (Knorr-Cetina 
and Preda, 2004; Pinch and Swedberg, 2008); and critiques of innovation 
policy, austerity, and assetization (Wisnioski et al., 2019; Mirowski, 
2013; Birch and Muniesa, 2020).

In parallel, scholars in communication, media, and information studies 
have examined how capital and finance shape—and are shaped by—the 
communicative infrastructures of technological life. Research on 
platform economies, algorithmic labor, and digital intermediation 
(Bishop, 2020, 2025; Gillespie, 2018) situates money as both discourse 
and medium, while work on infrastructural politics and “radical 
infrastructures” (Paris et al, 2023; Paris, forthcoming) highlights how 
funding models, data extraction, adtech, and platform governance 
reproduce the material and ideological conditions of technocapitalism.

The Tech/Money approach brings these strands together to re-center a 
political-economy perspective within the study of science, technology, 
and communication. We argue that contemporary technoscience cannot be 
understood apart from its financial architectures—venture investment, 
speculative valuation, policy regimes, and the imaginaries that sustain 
them. Treating money and finance not as external contexts but as 
constitutive, knowable infrastructures allows for a fuller account of 
how knowledge, value, and technological futures are co-produced. We 
invite contributions that extend this dialogue between STS and 
communication/media research, combining materialist political-economy 
approaches with nuanced theoretical and empirical analysis.

We are interested in pieces that address (but are not limited to) the 
following questions:

How is risk conceptualized and instrumentalized in the modern technology 
landscape?

How are bodies and data transformed into saleable commodities?

How do local or localized mutations of national or multinational 
companies and economies function differently in local geographies or at 
local scales?

How does examining the local reveal the multiplicity of capitalism (not 
a single capitalism, but multiple, overlapping capitalisms)?

How are the logics of technologized finance extending into new sectors?

How does technology allow capital and/or finance to move at new speeds 
and/or across new scales?

What technocapitalist imaginaries are centered in efforts to regulate 
emerging financial technologies?

What social meanings do venture capital and financial markets bring to 
or install in contemporary systems for the production of scientific and 
technical knowledge?

How are emerging forms of techno-finance, tech markets, and/or 
investment promoted as social good? How do these forms of hype build off 
or respond to historical fads in technology or finance?

How do financial or technological actors shape culture to reflect market 
logics or serve the purposes of the market?

What roles do hype, pitching, trend-spotting and “visionaries” play in 
the funding strategies and legitimacy claims of technocapital?

*Proposals should include: a 250-500 word abstract, a short 
bibliography, and author bio.*

*Please send these as one PDF to : (mrsauter /at/ umd.edu) 
<mailto:(mrsauter /at/ umd.edu)>*

*DUE DATE: 6 January 2026*

*Authors will receive a response by the end of January, with full 
chapters due by 1 May 2026*

*The volume will be published as open access with a major university 
press. No financial contribution from the authors is expected or required.*

Questions regarding the collected volume or the theme may be directed to 
any member of the editorial collective

Thank you and we look forward to reading your proposals-

M.R. Sauter, University of Maryland, College Park, (mrsauter /at/ umd.edu) 
<mailto:(mrsauter /at/ umd.edu)>
M. C. Forelle, University of Virginia, (mcf7sc /at/ virginia.edu) 
<mailto:(mcf7sc /at/ virginia.edu)>
Caroline Jack, University of California, San Diego, (cjack /at/ ucsd.edu) 
<mailto:(cjack /at/ ucsd.edu)>

WORKS CITED

Birch, Kean and Fabian Muniesa, eds. Assetization. MIT Press. (2020)
Bishop, Sophie. “Algorithmic Experts: Selling Algorithmic Lore on 
YouTube,” Social Media and Society. (2020); Influencer Creep, University 
of California Press. (2025)
Callon, Michel. Markets in the Making. Princeton University Press. (2021)
Birch, Kean and Fabian Muniesa, eds. Assetization. MIT Press. (2020)
Knorr Cetina, Karin and Alex Preda, eds. The Sociology of Financial 
Markets. Oxford University Press. (2004)
Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet. Yale University Press. 
(2018)
MacKenzie, Donald. An Engine Not A Camera. MIT Press. (2006)
Mirowski, Phillip. Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Verso. (2013)
Murphy, Michelle. The Economization of Life. Duke University Press. (2017)
Paris, B., Cath, C., & Myers-West, S. “Radical Infrastructure: Building 
Beyond the Failures of Past Imaginaries for Networked Communication.” 
New Media + Society. (2023)
Pinch, Trevor and Richard Swedberg, eds. Living in a Material World. MIT 
Press. (2008)
Swartz, Lana. New Money: How Payment Became Social Media. Yale 
University Press (2020); Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money 
Stuff. MIT Press. (2017)
Vinsel, Lee and Andrew R. Russell. The Innovation Delusion. Penguin 
Random House. (2020)
Wisnioski, Matthew; Eric Hintz; Marie Stettler Kleine, eds. Does America 
Need More Innovators. MIT Press. (2019)


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