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Cryo-innovations: Life in the Age of Artificial Cold

Wed, September 4, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Bayside C

Abstract

Cryopreservation has given way to a new scientific ice age: The ability to freeze and bank biological material is today a pivotal technological practice in animal breeding, conservation biology, and human reproduction. In the existing science and technology literature, the innovative and transformative potential of cold temperatures has been theorized as involving forms of “hindsight,” “suspense” and “salvage” (e.g. Hoeyer, 2017; Radin & Kowal, 2017; Radin, 2015). This panel invites transdisciplinary, empirical as well as theoretical papers related to the ways that cryobanking is imagined and animated in scientific, commercial, popular culture, and user accounts. Situated within feminist science and technology studies, we welcome papers that help explore the ways that cold temperatures interrupt understandings of linear time, human/non-human binaries as well as what comes to count as living matter. This includes, but is not limited to: 1. How the cryobanking of human and animal reproductive bits becomes imagined as a type of cryo-insurance, 2. How the cryobanking of human and animal wholes becomes imagined and animated as a type of cryo-optimism, 3. How the cryobanking of multiple species and seeds engage a type of cryopolitics, and 4. The cryo-aesthetics of cryobanking.

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