Apologies for cross posting
Call for papers for a session at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, 27-
29 August 2008. Please circulate widely.
Session Title - Branded: Assessing the application of intellectual
property rights to the protection of cultural and indigenous heritage
Organisers – Saskia Vermeylen (Lancaster University) and Bronwyn Parry
(Queen Mary University of London)
Sponsored by: Political Geography Research Group
The contemporary plight of indigenous peoples is often imagined to result
from the loss of land but indigenous peoples have lost more than ‘just’
their land. As a result of colonial and neo-colonial practices of
expropriation and displacement their knowledge systems, resources and
cultural heritages have also become the targets of strategies of
capitalist accumulation and appropriation, that have pushed them to the
edge of extinction.
Over time, indigenous peoples have employed various rhetorical and
practical devices for resisting these kinds of material and cultural
appropriation. Recently, and some would argue paradoxically, they have
turned to that most highly westernized and neo-liberal mechanism -
intellectual property rights – in an attempt to control the alienation of
their culture, heritage, knowledge and even identity. This approach has
brought them some qualified successes such as the return of museum
collections, protection against abuse of brand names (e.g. the case
of ‘Crazy Horse’ liquor) and benefit sharing agreements with
pharmaceutical companies. However, the publicity that has surrounded
these ‘success stories’ have often served to mask broader conceptual and
empirical questions about the ideological implications of the adoption of
such mechanisms or more nuanced analyses of the variability of the success
of these endeavors in different contexts, which remain largely undressed.
This session is concerned therefore with providing a critical examination
of the consequences of the application of IPR regimes to the protection of
indigenous and cultural heritage. We invite contributions that record the
historiography of the evolution of this approach, and which provide
critical and comparative assessments of the effectiveness of such
strategies in practice. We are particularly interested in examining
consequential effects: in papers that move beyond simplistic audits
of ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ to examine the philosophical, legal and
social ramifications of the adoption of IPRs for cultural survival,
revival and re-invention. We also encourage contributions that explore how
this struggle for ownership shapes and is shaped by the social and
political framings of the tangible and intangible aspects of indigineity.
We would also welcome work that critically examines how indigenous peoples
have used geographic concepts or tropes of ‘place’, ‘landscape’, ‘time’
and ‘identity’ in the promulgation of their protection strategies and
which assess the degree to which this has contributed to the formulation
of highly essentialised policy prescriptions.
It is envisaged that the selected papers for this conference will be
published in an edited collection by Routledge (2009).
Please submit a short abstract (250 words) to both Saskia Vermeylen
([log in to unmask]) and Bronwyn Parry ([log in to unmask]) by 11
February 2008 if you are interested in participating in the session.
Dr Saskia Vermeylen
Lecturer
Department of Geography
Lancaster University
Telephone: +44(0)1524 510255
Dr Bronwyn Parry
Reader in Economic and Cultural Geography
Department of Geography
Queen Mary University of London
Telephone: +44(0)207 882 5439
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