Enactments of Race in the UK’s Blood Stem Cell Inventory

Recent sociological analyses of the intersections of race and science recognize race’s quality an enacted object. Through this analytic lens, race is always materializing in the practices processes that enroll it and therefore enjoys a kind of multiplicity. The context of blood cell transplantation, a scientific domain marked by a more and less explicitly racialised , offers an opportunity to see the conceptual assertion of race’s multiplicity play out. , an exploration of the UK’s stem cell inventory reveals – through analysis of interviews, and parliamentary meetings – how race materialises in the various practices that this increasingly popular cancer treatment option. Looking at practices of , inventory management and tissue selection in particular provides an interesting to look upon race and the many signifiers that implicate it. These cases reveal of race’s stablisation and silencing; its oscillation between the status of vital to the life of a public stem cell inventory, and of secondary data that provides useful information to clinicians selecting tissue. Adopting an analytic lens that attends to ’s multiple enactments allows us to begin asking why enactments take the shape they do, why the particular practices that mobilise them come to be.