Lecture series organized by Stefanie Graefe, Irina Herb, Susanne Lettow in the context of the research project Property in the human body in the context of transnational economies of reproduction.

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Kean Birch (York University Toronto): Venture Capital and Reflexive Expectations in Biotech Financing

Social studies of 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. In this article, I examine how venture capitalists and others understand, construct, and deploy future expectations in biotech financing. I do so to analyse how these reflexive efforts configure the valuation and investment decisions of venture capitalists and others in their orbit. I build on analytical perspectives in STS and adjacent fields such as organization studies and economic sociology that analyse the role of expectations – manifested as stories, narratives, and accounts – in social action. To do so, I unpack how reflexivity comes to configure valuation and investment decisions, and the objectives they rationalize.

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