TY  - JOUR
A1  - Liburkina, Ruzana
T1  - Cryovalues beyond high expectations: endurance and the construction of value in cord blood banking
T2  - Science, technology, & human values
N2  - Cryopreservation attracts attention as a practice grounded in high expectations: current life is suspended for future use—to generate life, to save life, and to resurrect life. But what happens when high expectations in cryobanking give way to looming uselessness and the risk of failure? Based on ethnographic insights into the case of umbilical cord blood (CB) banking in Germany, this contribution investigates the liminal state of “non-failure.” Averting failure amid a lack of success in this field requires putting effort into the construction of value. The resulting practices and dynamics overflow generic stories of commercialization and instrumentalization of biological material and are best grasped as an expanded version of the recently coined notion of “cryovalue.” The long-term availability of cryopreserved CB facilitates the steady yield of social and economic capital beyond and after promise. Moreover, the value construction is reoriented from CB itself toward the socio-technical cryo-arrangements in which it is embedded. In exemplifying how it expands the understanding of the diversity of valuation and valorization practices, continuities, and economic endurance in cryoeconomies and bioeconomies, the paper advocates the study of their ambivalent and allegedly uneventful sites.
KW  - cryovalue
KW  - cord blood banking
KW  - failure
KW  - endurance
KW  - value construction
KW  - cryotechnology
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/73494
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-734941
SN  - 1552-8251
N1  - Online Version before inclusion in an issue
N1  - The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: H2020 European Research Council (788196).
VL  - 2022
IS  - online version before inclusion in an issue
SP  - 1
EP  - 28
PB  - Sage Publications
CY  - London
ER  -