Caroline Celeste White-Nockleby, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT); Jonathan Galka
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
In late 2021, accusations of COVID-19 vaccine stockpiling catapulted the complex logistics of cold storage to the forefront of international news. Yet the politics of storing materials, ??from sites as diverse as Cold War metals stockpiles (Folkers 2019) to contemporary aquifers (Randle 2021), have long captured the attention of science studies scholars. This panel explores how technoscientific infrastructures and imaginaries of storage may both recuperate and reconfigure networks and relations. Storage can, for instance, mediate, buffer, and smooth flows of people and goods to sustain capital’s aspiration to seamless circulation (Orenstein 2019). Storing anticipates a plurality of futures, but it can also invite unintended consequences (Radin and Kowal 2017); things decay, things revive, value ebbs and flows, and some futures become the present. This panel asks how, why, and with what intentions and consequences materials are stored. Scholars have conceptualized storage as a process of meaning-making and material maintenance through which social and environmental futures are negotiated by choreographing labor, power, time, and the unstable ontological identity of things. Storage has been examined across fields as diverse as data science (Taylor 2019), biomedicine (Keck 2020), resource governance (Graeter 2020), energy technology (Günel 2016), and seed and other biobanking (Roosth 2019). Common among these accounts is attention to both historical inheritances and future-anticipatory orientations of storing. Taking storage as a site for the production of possibility, we invite contributions in English or Spanish that investigate storage in a technoscientific frame.
