Fourth Annual International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property Workshop

25-26 June, 2012
London School of Economics, London
Deadline for proposals: 1 March, 2012

Intellectual property rights are generally supposed to function as means of stimulating and diffusing cultural production. This instrumentalist understanding of how intellectual property works as a cultural technology has survived for more than two centuries; it has been amplified and refined by a long tradition of economic analysis and economic history, and it has now been retrenched as the basic premise of contemporary debates about public domains, digital commons, and the expansion of corporate semiotic power. How plausible or illuminating is this pervasive representation of the agency of intellectual property rights?

There are some familiar ways of testing this representation. Lawyers and economists ask whether patent laws work as they should in the domains of, for example, software or biomedical innovation, they speculate as to the reasons why creativity in the fashion industry seems to flourish in a ‘negative space’ (a domain unframed by copyright law), and they ask how formal intellectual property rights work with ‘social norms’. But these lines of inquiry still reduce culture to what can be rendered in terms of scarcity, efficiency, and instrumentality.

The theme of this conference seeks to elicit alternative approaches to the cultural implications of intellectual property and cultural property laws.

Call for contributions

The organisers invite contributions from established and doctoral scholars working in the broad field of the humanities and the social sciences, including anthropology, economic history, history of science, media studies, literary theory, science studies, and critical theory, as well as legal history and legal theory.

Papers selected for presentation at the workshop will be circulated in advance to registered participants. Abstracts of proposed papers (together with a brief author bio) should be submitted by 1 March 2012. A maximum length of 9,000 words is recommended.

Important dates

Submission of proposal (abstract and bio): 1 March, 2012

Notification of acceptance: 31 March, 2012

Submission of paper: 1 June, 2012

Workshop: 25-26 June, 2012

For further information see the workshop website.