Call for paper "What Holds Startups Together? Exploring Infrastructures, Places, and Knowledge", Zurich September 10–12, 2025

[Loïc Riom]

Dear colleagues,

This is a kind reminder that there are only 7 days left to submit proposals for our panel, "What Holds Startups Together? Exploring Infrastructures, Places, and Knowledge", which will be held at the STS-CH Conference “Holding Things Together? Change, Continuity, Critique”, from September 10–12, 2025, in Zurich (University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, and ZHdK).

You can find the full Call for Papers and submission details below.

We’re happy to answer any questions—and please don’t hesitate to circulate the call within your networks.

Best wishes,

Tanja & Loïc

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What Holds Startups Together? Exploring Infrastructures, Places, and Knowledge

Since the early 21st century, the startup has emerged as a central figure in global business culture (Koskinen 2023). From Google to Uber, from Elizabeth Holmes to Sam Altman, startups have been a key vehicle of the expansion of the Tech industry and of the narrative of the Silicon Valley’s success. Start-up as a form stages the figure of an entrepreneur “chasing” innovation (Irani 2019) and capable of creating value through disruptions (Geiger 2020). This specific way of driving the economy has fostered a distinctive set of practices, discourses, devices and organizational forms, which have received increasing scholarly attention in recent years (Heimstädt 2023; Doganova 2013; Fairbairn, Kish, et Guthman 2022; Rosental 2024; Cooiman 2023; Birch 2023). These and further studies have begun to explore how and to what effect startups are reshaping markets, work and industrial sectors (Riom 2024; Schneider 2018; Shestakofsky 2024; Watson, Leyshon, et Windsor 2023).

By bringing together perspectives from science and technology studies, economic sociology, geography, political economy, and related disciplines, this panel seeks to critically examine what holds startup together and explore the infrastructures, places, and knowledge that they are attached to.

We invite paper proposals that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• The places of startups: pitches, incubators, accelerators, and trade fairs within and beyond the Silicon Valley
• From ARDC to Sequoia: historicizing the startup form and venture capitalism
• Hypes and trends: Startups in the media sphere and public debate
• Valuing science: Innovation policies through the lens of startups
• Accounting practices in the startup economy: shares, capitalization, and investment rounds
• Accelerations, disruption and hypergrowth: politics of scalability

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts should not exceed 300 words
• Submissions must be made via Converia: Submit a Paper here
• Deadline for submissions: May 9, 2025

 

References

Birch, Kean. 2023. « Reflexive Expectations in Innovation Financing: An Analysis of Venture Capital as a Mode of Valuation ». Social Studies of Science 53 (1): 29‑48. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127221118372.

Cooiman, Franziska. 2023. « Veni Vidi VC – the Backend of the Digital Economy and Its Political Making ». Review of International Political Economy 30 (1): 229‑51. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2021.1972433.

Doganova, Liliana. 2013. Valoriser la science: les partenariats des start-up technologiques. Presses des Mines.

Fairbairn, Madeleine, Zenia Kish, and Julie Guthman. 2022. « Pitching agri-food tech: performativity and non-disruptive disruption in Silicon Valley ». Journal of Cultural Economy 15 (5): 652‑70. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2022.2085142.

Geiger, Susi. 2020. « Silicon Valley, disruption, and the end of uncertainty ». Journal of Cultural Economy 13 (2): 169‑84. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2019.1684337

Heimstädt, Cornelius. 2023. « The exploratory assetization of a crop protection app ». Environmental Science & Policy 140: 242‑49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2022.12.014.

Irani, Lilly. 2019. Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Princeton University Press.

Koskinen, Henri. 2023. « Outlining startup culture as a global form ». Journal of Cultural Economy 16 (6): 812‑28. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2216215.

Riom, Loïc. 2024. « Being a “Global Music Platform”: Platform Work in Light-Tech Capitalism ». Social Media + Society 10 (3).https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241274658.

Rosental, Claude. 2024. « Preparing for Demo Day at a Startup Accelerator. From Techno-Rhetoric to Technological Solutionism ». Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances 18 (18‑4). https://journals.openedition.org/rac/35120.

Schneider, Tanja. 2018. « Promising Sustainable Foods: Entrepreneurial Visions of Sustainable Food Futures. » In Alternative Food Politics : From the Margins to the Mainstream, edited by Michelle Phillipov and Katherine Kirkwood, 75‑94. London & New York: Routledge.

Shestakofsky, Benjamin. 2025. « The labor of assetization: producing ‘hypergrowth’inside a tech startup ». Socio-Economic Review, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwae057

Watson, Allan, Andrew Leyshon, and George Windsor. 2023. « Tech Start-up Capitalisation in an Oligopolistic Copyright Industry: The Case of the Contemporary Music Industry ». Cultural Trends, 1‑19.https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2023.2255832