Annual ISHTIP Workshop
University of Roma Tre, 4-6 July 2018
Call for Papers
Intellectual Property and Heritage
2018 marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of ISHTIP, which held its first workshop in the Stationers’ Hall in London in March 2008. The Stationers Hall, with its special place in intellectual property law and history, seemed an appropriate place to kick off an interdisciplinary society with a particular focus on the interaction of those two disciplines. Ten years on, ISHTIP has deepened its interdisciplinary engagement providing a forum for an array of new disciplinary and critical theoretical perspectives. Influenced by the idea of reflecting on the heritage of ISHTIP itself, and inspired by its location in a city that has a special place in the canon of Western heritage, this year’s workshop invites proposals for papers on the relationship between forms of intellectual property and heritage. The concept of heritage, despite being vaguely defined in law – or perhaps because of this – is part of a rhetorical moving feast in political and cultural discourse. Not only does its apparent subject matter often overlap with the subject matter of intellectual property, it also shares many of the problematic tropes of intellectual property. These include, but are not limited to, matters such as its strongly occidental flavour located in an ordering of knowledge that claims to be universal, its apparently constitutive relationship with social understandings of concepts like culture and innovation, and its uncertain relationship with concepts of im/materiality and in/tangibility. Like intellectual property, it is also characterised by the wide range of disciplinary perspectives that it has attracted. In other ways it is profoundly different. One of the significant differences in the present context is that as an area of study it has, so far, been subject to less colonization by legal scholars. We hope, therefore, that this will generate a particularly rich interdisciplinary exchange in Rome in July 2018.
Proposals for papers that address this call from a historical or theoretically informed perspective are invited from scholars working across the disciplines. Proposers should be aware that authors do not present their own papers at ISHTIP workshops. Instead, a commentator presents a brief summary and critique to initiate the general discussion of each paper. This means that if a proposal is accepted then a written paper must be submitted by the date indicated below.
Proposals for papers should be no more than one page long, accompanied by a two page cv, and addressed to fionaelizabeth.macmillan@uniroma3.it
Date for submission of proposals: 16 February 2018
Expected date for notification of acceptance: 2 March 2018
Written papers due: 1 June 2018
