Michelle Venetucci is an economic anthropologist whose research examines how speculative finance and suburban middle-class life are co-produced through intertwined projects of future-making. Focusing on Silicon Valley’s venture capital-backed political economy, her work investigates how corporate growth is socially and politically produced through everyday practices, even as its inequalities and harms become increasingly visible. Drawing on ethnographic and historical methods, her research explores how expectations of homeownership, family stability, and economic security provide the social and material networks through which speculative value is produced, while equity compensation transforms speculative growth into the infrastructures of middle-class life. Her dissertation, Silicon Suburbia: Venture Trajectories and the Making of the Middle Class in Silicon Valley, draws on fifteen months of fieldwork conducted in 2022-2023 to examine how venture capital, technology work, and suburban family life become mutually constitutive forms of value production. Situating Silicon Valley’s culture of technological hype within longer histories of frontier expansion, suburbanization, and state-supported development, the project argues that contemporary middle-class reproduction increasingly depends upon speculative growth. By placing speculative finance and suburbia into the same analytic frame, this study demonstrates how inequality is reproduced not only through spectacular accumulation at the top, but through the routine work of maintaining home, family, and class position in the middle.
Research interests: Science and Technology Studies (STS), economic anthropology, anthropology of finance, corporations, feminist studies of capitalism.
