CALL FOR PAPERS
Submission Deadline: February 1, 2025
Broadly considered, critical race IP brings together two strands of scholarship: critical race theory and intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, unfair competition, rights of publicity). Scholarship in Critical Race Intellectual Property (CRTIP) engages a variety of topics and texts, with a unifying emphasis on how race, colonialism, and nationalism inform and shape intellectual property law and politics. Issues from vaccine apartheid to choreography misappropriation have recently generated front page headlines. Race + IP ’25: Abolitionist Futures, our fifth anniversary conference, held on April 17-19, 2025 at the University of Pittsburgh, engages these issues through interdisciplinary conversations with scholars, activists, and practitioners on social movement politics, particularly those related to race, gender, disability, and abolition.
Some questions that might come up in this space include:
- What does it mean to think intersectionally about race, colonialism, nationalism, and intellectual property alongside social movement politics?
- Who are the stakeholders in intellectual property and social movement conversations?
- What are the stakes of widening intellectual property conversations to interface with issues such as decarceral politics, economic justice, and international colonialisms?
- What institutions, organizations, and projects can be collaborators in this work?
- How does movement lawyering operate in an intellectual property context?
- What does transformative justice look like in the context of intellectual property?
- What do abolition and decarcerality look like in the context of intellectual property?
- How do the lessons that social justice movements have learned about new technologies, e.g. AI, social media and surveillance apparatuses, inform the study of intellectual property?
- What can intellectual property scholars, practitioners, and activists learn from the histories and presents of social movement scholars, practitioners, and activists, including about issues such as racial capitalism, authoritarian politics, and multiracial democracy?
- What alternative models of ownership/stewardship exist to counter these issues?
- How do alternative methods of stewardship, e.g. moral rights, communal ownership, that could be described as “protection without policing,” factor into these conversation?
- What do different stakeholders, e.g. artists, musicians, makers, think about these issues?
- What methodologies might be used to study these issues and what are their implications?
- How do legal doctrinal commitments in intellectual property work against “progress”?
- How can intellectual property scholars and activists study global social movements?
For full consideration, please submit an abstract of a maximum of 350 words of the proposed submission with your name, position, and affiliation to raceipconference@gmail.com. We welcome submissions in non-traditional formats from participants at all stages in their careers. Junior scholars who indicate their positions on their submissions will be considered for slots set aside for Emerging Scholars.
Abstracts must be received by February 1, 2025.
Selected papers may be published in an edited volume or symposium issue of a law review. Please contact raceipconference@gmail.com with any questions.
We look forward to seeing you in April 2025!
Conference Archives 2017 – 2023
The Imperial Scholar Revisited
Race and IP in Crisis
Race + IP ’21 @ FAMU College of Law
Colonial and Racial Legacies
Building Race + IP