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@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

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@umd.edu
M. C. Forelle, University of Virginia, mcf7sc@virginia.edu
Caroline Jack, University of California, San Diego, cjack@ucsd.edu