2025/06/12 by Veit Braun · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · doi:10.1177/00016993251348997
openalex publication_date 2025/06/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This article seeks to understand the role of storage for social time. While social theory has largely interpreted storage in spatial terms, a recent body of literature explores how cold storage technologies affect society's relationship with time. The ability to suspend life in ice, several scholars argue, leads to a new relationship with time: the future becomes malleable as frozen cells, tissues and seeds are options with which events can be reversed, action can be postponed, and the status quo can be preserved. However, a growing number of empirical studies of cold storage complicates this hypothesis, finding that these technologies are often used to accelerate action instead. The divergence, this article argues, can be understood by linking the assumptions underlying the suspension hypothesis to sociological concepts like value, expectations, and especially practice. It argues that under certain circumstances, storage is best understood as dynamic rather than static. Taking in things and releasing them at different rates, it acts as a form of buffer that can link social activity and flows of different speeds and rhythms without imposing a shared temporality on them. On these grounds, the article pleads for a broadened understanding of storage as a social technique that affects both space and time.