Speculative Frontiers of Technoscience and Innovation: Academic Scientists’ Engagement with Promissory and Emerging Technologies in Everyday Practice

This paper revisits nanotechnology as a once-speculative field that attracted significant interest from science and technology studies (STS) scholars during its promissory phase, yet has received comparatively little attention now that it is partially institutionalised and entangled in the everyday practices of research and innovation. We approach nanotechnology as a compelling case that now offers the opportunity to study what becomes of technoscientific promises after the hype fades. Drawing on sociological, qualitative, in-depth interviews with 34 scientists working in university-based nanoscience, we examine how the promissory horizons of nanotechnology confront the structural realities of academic science today and identify four key themes: (1) the persistence of idealised visions of science and its societal role; (2) the complexities of university–industry entanglements; (3) growing pressures to commercialise; and (4) limited, often administrative, engagement with ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI). Together, these themes reveal how promissory understandings of what science ‘is’ and what science ‘does’ exist in tension with the realities of everyday institutional practices. We argue that revisiting nano through the lens of STS highlights how speculative ideals become sedimented in routine practice and underscores the need for sustained attention to the afterlives of technoscientific promises across emerging and established domains