Cryovalues beyond high expectations: endurance and the construction of value in cord blood banking
- 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.
Author: | Ruzana LiburkinaORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-734941 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439221108229 |
ISSN: | 1552-8251 |
Parent Title (English): | Science, technology, & human values |
Publisher: | Sage Publications |
Place of publication: | London |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2022/06/28 |
Date of first Publication: | 2022/06/28 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2023/04/04 |
Tag: | cord blood banking; cryotechnology; cryovalue; endurance; failure; value construction |
Volume: | 2022 |
Issue: | online version before inclusion in an issue |
Page Number: | 28 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 28 |
Note: | Online Version before inclusion in an issue |
Note: | 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). |
HeBIS-PPN: | 508980054 |
Institutes: | Gesellschaftswissenschaften |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 10 Philosophie / 100 Philosophie und Psychologie |
3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften | |
6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 60 Technik / 600 Technik, Technologie | |
6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 61 Medizin und Gesundheit / 610 Medizin und Gesundheit | |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - CC BY-NC - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell 4.0 International |