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Pricing the Priceless Spacecraft: Financial Relations and the Social Construction of Technology

Thu, August 21, 8:30 to 10:30am, Intercontinental Hotel, Monserrat II

Abstract

What is the role of money in the production of scientific knowledge? How does science funding itself become an object of scientific or expert inquiry? Using case material drawn from historical and ethnographic investigations of NASA-funded robotic spaceflight teams, the paper advances a relational approach to science funding in which cost estimates, budgetary requests, and resource allocations becomes a way of constituting differentiated social relationships and therefore the kinds of knowledge produced. Money in this relational perspective becomes less a necessary evil or a hard constraint, as a socially negotiated plane for imagining and mobilizing competing visions of scientific projects and contributing to the social construction of technology. In pricing scientific projects, then, we argue there is never a single, final price, but instead multiple competing values reflecting contests over the conventions and practices of counting and accounting science. Drawing on ethnographic and archival material from two NASA missions to the outer solar system, we demonstrate that science funding becomes a way of both “doing the organization,” and ultimately practicing science as well.

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