This weekend, I’ll be Cleveland at the Con/Texts of Invention workshop:
This conference interrogates the social and cultural construction of invention – the diverse ways in which invention has been conceptualized in the arts and sciences in the broadest sense, including literature, the fine arts, entertainment, the physical and life sciences, law, economics, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, communications, computation, finance, and business. Emphasis will be on the institutional cultures, rhetorics, and histories of invention across these fields. In this way the Society seeks to extend and deepen the inquiry of its long-standing project on “Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship”
I’m not giving a paper, but was invited to participate by AU Law Professor Peter Jaszi, and I’ve been getting increasingly excited about the weekend as I’ve read through the precirculated papers. If I weren’t in Cleveland, however, I’d be up in New Haven, at the Access to Knowledge conference organized by the Yale Law School Information Society Project:
In the digital era, most multinational corporations and policymakers are of the view that the current trend characterised by increasing intellectual property rights and corporate control over knowledge best serve society’s interests. At the same time, however, a growing number of commentators believe that widespread access to knowledge (A2K) and the preservation of a healthy knowledge commons are the real basis for sustainable human development. Nonetheless, intellectual property-based approaches continue to singlehandedly dictate global legal norms and shape national legal infrastructures.
The first goal of the Yale A2K Initiative is to come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly distortive effects of public policies relying exclusively on intellectual property rights. Beyond this aim, the A2K initiative seeks to support the adoption and development of alternative ways to foster greater access to knowledge in the digitally connected environment.
Two really fascinating conferences, each representative of a particular trend I’ve been noticing in the scholarly world – these days, much of the really fascinating inquiry into information studies has been taking place in the unexpected intersection of STS, Communication/Information Science, and Law.
