Veit Braun
studied Political Science, Sociology and Environmental Studies in Vienna and Munich. He wrote his dissertation in sociology on the role of property and its recent crises in plant breeding. Since 2019 he has been part of the ERC project CRYOSOCIETIES, investigating how the possibilities of freezing endangered animal species change the landscape of biodiversity conservation. His research interests are biology, ecology, economic theory and concepts as well as practices and technologies of property.
Publications
Core Publications
Braun, V. (2020). From Commodity to Asset and Back Again: Property in the Capitalism of Varieties. In K. Birch & F. Muniesa (Eds.), Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (pp. 203–224). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12075.001.0001 (OA)
The Multispecies Editing Collective (eds.). (2017). Troubling Species: Care and Belonging in a Relational World. Munich: Rachel Carson Center. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7768 (OA)
Most recent
Braun, V., Brill, S., & Dobeson, A. (2021). The mutability of economic things. Journal of Cultural Economy, 14(3), 271–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2021.1911829 (OA)
Braun, V. (2021). Holding on to and letting go of seed: quasi-commodities and the passage of property. Journal of Cultural Economy, 14(3), 306–318. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1824934
Braun, V. (2021). Tools of Extraction or Means of Speculation? Making Sense of Patents in the Bioeconomy. In M. Backhouse, R. Lehmann, K. Lorenzen, M. Lühmann, J. Puder, F. Rodríguez, & A. Tittor (Eds.), Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities (pp. 65–84). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68944-5_4 (OA)
Research
Suspended Life: Exploring Cryopreservation Practices in Contemporary Societies (CRYOSOCIETIES) (1 April 2019 – 31 March 2024, Advanced Grant, European Research Council, Grant No. 788196, Prof. Dr. Thomas Lemke, Veit Braun, Dr. Sara Lafuente, Ruzana Liburkina)
Cryopreservation practices are an essential dimension of contemporary life sciences. They make possible the freezing and storage of cells, tissues and other organic materials at very low temperatures and the subsequent thawing of these at a future date without apparent loss of vitality. Although cryotechnologies are fundamental to reproductive technologies, regenerative medicine, transplantation surgery and conservation biology, they have largely escaped scholarly attention in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology.
The range of applications for cryopreservation is not limited to human material. It also encompasses archives which collect gametes, tissue or DNA of plants and animals. In recent decades, the accelerating extinction of species has led to an enormous effort to collect and store specimens, relying on cryotechnological procedures. The aim is to preserve biodiversity by deep-freezing organic material of endangered or extinct species. Such cryobanks are more than sites of conservation and storage, since they also provide the material resources for the potential resurrection of extinct species. These strategies of reanimation – known as “resurrection biology” or “de-extinction science” – are intended to “bring back to life” species that are already extinct by the use of reproductive and genetic technologies (e.g. embryo transfer, intergenic surrogacy and cloning).
The ethnography in my subproject focuses on two British cryobanks, Frozen Ark and CryoArks, as well as similar facilities in Europe. In my research, I observe the practices aimed at halting extinction by securing a frozen “backup” of animal specimens and examine the ambivalent prospects of “conservation” and “resurrection” in the cryoprojects. The project traces the human and non-human actors assembled in endeavours to protect and reanimate threatened species. Through participant observation in the Frozen Ark consortium as well as interviews with zoologists, conservation biologists, environmentalists and researchers working in the field of de-extinction science, it investigate the ways in which knowledge about the “suspended life” of frozen animal specimens shapes conservation concerns and practices.