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Conferences & lectures

Venture Capital as a Mode of Valuation with Kean Birch

Stories, Hi-Tech Financing and a Reflexive Turn in ‘Expectations Studies’


Date & time
Friday, October 29, 2021
1 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.

Registration is closed

Speaker(s)

Kean Birch

Cost

This event is free

Organization

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Contact

Chris Hurl

Where

Online

Social studies of technological expectations are premised on the notion that the future is brought into the present, and thereby expectations about the future come to shape our actions, decisions and practices in ways that performatively bring about the imagined future.

Birch will explore the role of future expectations in hi-tech financing, especially in the life sciences sector, in order to understand the reflexive effects of such expectations in changing the decisions of market actors. He will draw on a longstanding interest in narratives and discourse in organization studies. He will analyze the role of ‘stories’ in how financiers (e.g., venture capitalists) and others make and perform valuation decisions. He will unpack how those stories about the future reflexively transform the ways that valuation is understood and the goals it rationalizes.

Part of the Sociology & Anthropology Speaker Series.

About the speaker

Kean Birch is an associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. His recent research focuses on assetization and rentiership in technoscientific capitalism. Recent work includes the 2020 edited book with Fabian Muniesa, Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (MIT Press).

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