SCHEDULE (ALL TIMES IN EST)

THURSDAY APRIL 13, 2023
Held at the Hotel Indigo, Technology Center

5:00PM – 5:30PM MINGLING TIME

5:30PM – 5:45PM OPENING REMARKS, Interim Dean Haider Hamoudi

5:45PM – 6:15PM OPENING REMARKS, Anjali Vats

6:15PM – 6:45PM KEYNOTE SPEAKERS, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic

6:45PM – 9:00PM COCKTAIL RECEPTION

with film screening of Copyright Criminals and sound selections by DJ Double K

FRIDAY APRIL 14, 2023
Held at the Cathedral of Learning, 20th Floor

8:30AM – 9:15AM BREAKFAST (ON SITE)

9:30AM – 11:00AM THE IMPERIAL SCHOLAR AS LENS FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

This introductory panel asks how the now canonical lens of “imperial scholarship” advanced by Critical Race Theory Richard Delgado applies to intellectual property law. In Delgado’s original piece, he argued that there exists a tendency among white legal scholars to cite one another, creating a feedback loop in which it is impossible to create new methods of reading and thinking. The speakers on this panel consider how intellectual property scholars engage in imperial scholarship through, for instance, citational practices, topic selections, theoretical lenses, analytic concepts, methodological preferences, and speaker choices. They also offer more inclusive frameworks for intellectual property scholarship.

Featuring

Jessica Kiser

Kavita Philip

Dalindyebo Shabalala

with Deidré Keller moderating

11:00AM – 12:15PM LUNCH (ON SITE)

Lunch on site is intended to be an open session for community building. We encourage you to grab a lunch, find a seat next to someone new, and strike up a conversation.

12:30PM – 2:00PM METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS IN ANTIRACIST IP

This methodologies panel asks what types of approaches might be useful for scholars doing race and intellectual property scholarship. Whether grounded in archival research, doctrinal analysis, or practical implementation, persuasive and effective race and intellectual property scholarship involves curating ways of doing research that will resonate with audiences across disciplines. The speakers on this panel highlight how their research methodologies produced evidenced conclusions and discuss how those conclusions can be used to encourage policymakers and activists to pursue new and innovative paths to intersectional racial equity. They will also encourage dialogue about how researchers might approach questions in this area in the future.

Colleen Chien

Celnisha Dangerfield

Kara Swanson

with Sheila Vélez-Martínez moderating

2:15PM – 3:45PM RACE + IP AS MOVEMENT BUILDING

This moderated conversation will (re)locate conversations about race and intellectual property in the context of contemporary movement work, specifically around racial justice and collaborative care. By taking up the lenses of solidarity, anticapitalism, and abolition, it will build on existing interventions by lawyers, activists, and scholars to create a more just and equitable world. This session will also propose future community driven work in intersectional race and intellectual property, organized and funded through a collaborative consortium that produces theoretical and practical programming.

with Anjali Vats moderating

4:00PM – 4:30PM A MOMENT TO DECOMPRESS

This moment to decompress is intended to give conference attendees space to connect with one another, enjoy some tea, explore the campus, or whatever else they choose. We will display new books in the area and the Race + IP Syllabus during this time.

4:45PM – 6:15PM NEW BOOKS IN ANTI-IMPERIALIST INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

This biennial panel provides space for discussing new books in intellectual property and race with their authors. Lateef Mtima and Steven Jamar’s Cambridge Handbook of Intellectual Property and Social Justice takes a comprehensive look at equity and inclusion in intellectual property contexts. Larisa Mann’s Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power explores alternative approaches to intellectual property in the context of dancehall music. And Matthew Morrison’s Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States develops Blacksound, an analogue to Blackface, as an analytic for understanding Euroamerican histories of race, music, and copyright.

Lateef Mtima

Larisa Mann

Matthew Morrison

with Ron Idoko moderating

6:30PM DINNER (ON YOUR OWN)

SATURDAY APRIL 15, 2023
Held at the Cathedral of Learning, 20th Floor

8:30AM – 9:15AM BREAKFAST (ON SITE)

9:30AM – 11:00AM RACE, MEDIA INDUSTRIES, AND IP

This media industries panel considers how intellectual property law protects and dispossesses artists, through the use of exploitative contracts, industry structures, extractive practices and more. In this sense, it highlights possible pressure points for creators and their allies to push for equality in their respective industries. The speakers on this panel are situated within a variety of creative industries, from music to hospitality, with differing perspectives on how to advocate for creators of color in those spaces. They also showcase the breadth of approaches to equalizing footing in industry spaces, with an eye to racial justice, ranging from rights-reclamation to economic restructuring.

Featuring

Margaret Chon & Olufunmilayo Arewa

Aman Gebru

Kevin J. Greene

with Ashtin Berry moderating

11:00AM – 12:15PM LUNCH (ON SITE)

Lunch on site is intended to be an open session for community building. We encourage you to grab a lunch, find a seat next to someone new, and strike up a conversation.

12:30PM – 2:00PM PUBLISHING EQUITY THROUGH A CRTIP LENS

This publishing equity panel focuses on some of the under discussed but extremely important equity issues around book publishing and copyright scope that affect creators across spaces, including trade and academic publishing. Whether in the context of academia or trade, protection of expression and publishing rights are of vital importance to creators and their livelihoods. The speakers on this panel highlight inequity issues that arise in industry structures, contract negotiations, bargaining power, publishing access, copyrightable content and more across lines of race and gender. They also propose collaborative approaches and accessible resources for addressing such issues in the contexts of their respective industries and expertise.

Suresh Ariaratnam 

Zahr Said

Elias Wondimu

with Jacqui Lipton moderating

2:15PM – 3:45PM THINKING BEYOND UTILITARIANISM

This theoretical panel decenters utilitarianism as the dominant paradigm for thinking about and engaging with intellectual property. Abolition, dispossession, and decoloniality are three concepts that have emerged in conversations about how to undo not only traditional models of intellectual property but also narrow visions of equity and inclusion. These are approaches that challenge the audience to think beyond mere rights based remedies to the structural issues that undergird them. The speakers on this panel continue a conversation about the tendency of mainstream “theory” panels to overrepresent whiteness and masculinity. They emphasize the need to find new and liberatory ways of thinking about knowledge ownership and management, including abolition.

Chris Byrnes

Amaka Vanni

Peter K. Yu

with Michael Madison moderating

4:00PM – 5:30PM    NEW DIRECTIONS IN IP AND EQUITY

This forward-looking panel centers the work of emerging scholars who are working across a wide range of areas in race and intellectual property. Their interdisciplinary scholarship showcases the many conversations yet to be had in these areas. Whether drawing from legal practice, international lenses, or STS methodologies, the papers they present point us to the futures of this interdisciplinary movement while grounding the conversations in existing literatures. The speakers on this panel demonstrate that there is much work to be done, by speaking to doctrinal analysis, legal practice, global perspectives, and historical studies. They also offer a return to the themes of the conference by way of their emphasis on the operations of ongoing imperialisms in intellectual property.

Akshat Agrawal

Olivia Bethea

Tiffany Nichols

with J. Janewa Osei-Tutu moderating

5:30PM – 6:00PM CLOSING REMARKS, Deidré Keller

6:00PM – 8:00PM CLOSING RECEPTION

with sound selections by DJ Ripley (Subversion PHL)