I invited to speak last week at an event at the University of Kent organised between Kent Law School and SATSU here at York. This was a workshop exploring the issue of temporality as it pertains to the creation of regulation (broadly conceived).
In amongst papers about indigenous epistemologies of ownership and the US's electronic mortgage registration system (MERS), the importance of Greenwich Mean Time in the British imperial project of maritime sovereignty and modernity, I was asked to talk about issues arising from my own thesis.
My paper explored how the public umbilical cord blood bank contends with the regularly updated professional standards intended to regulate the clinicians who use the collected tissue. The collection managers must anticipate future clinical need, typing and diagnosing tissue beyond current clinical expectations, and regularly appraising older stock. This anticipatory logic, as I call it in the paper, demonstrates the temporal rhythm of a repository of tissues collected in the past, maintained in the present, and of potential use in the future.
See more info here: http://www.kent.ac.uk/
