Kavita Philip

Associate Professor of Women's Studies
University of California, Irvine

LECTURE

"Transnational Circuits of Technological Reproduction: Getting to Technoscience Studies via Gender, Race, History, & Theory"

October 18, 2007
4:00pm – 5:00pm
8417 Social Science Building

Reception beforehand at 3:30pm

Abstract:

Digital “Pirates” - Intellectual property robbers - today traffic in images, music, and software. Although business analysts regard this as a novel problem, supposedly precipitated by the unprecedented importance of “knowledge” as a force of economic production, historians of science and law tell stories of intellectual property theft that predate the current IPR discourse by two centuries. What can we learn if, rather than joining the chorus of libertarian or radical critiques of corporate ownership and intellectual property, we investigate the assumptions that undergird the current discussion of piracy? We might track the ways in which certain narratives of authorship, creativity and ownership emerge. What forms of globalized citizenship and personhood are being shaped via the emerging legal discourses of intellectual property, on all sides of the struggle for access to new forms of information?

CONVERSATION WITH GRADUATE STUDENTS

at our bi-weekly brownbag

October 18, 2007
12:00pm – 1:30pm
8108 Social Science Building

Please contact Jay (sts@ssc.wisc.edu) for the two readings for this brownbag.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kavita Philip is Associate Professor at UC Irvine’s Program in Women’s Studies, and affiliate faculty in UCI’s Department of Anthropology; Department of History; Critical Theory Institute; Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies; Center for Ethnography; Center for Law and Society; and Program in Arts, Computation, Engineering.

Her research interests are in transnational histories of science and technology; feminist technocultures; gender, race, globalization and postcolonialism; environmental history; and new media theory.

Her essays have appeared in the journals Cultural Studies, Postmodern Culture, Postcolonial Studies, NMediaC, Radical History Review, and Environment and History. She is the author of Civilizing Natures (Rutgers University Press, USA; Orient Longman, UK and Asia, 2004); co-editor, Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization (M.E. Sharpe, 2003); co-editor, Multiple Contentions (Radical History Review 2003); co-editor, Homeland Securities (Radical History Reviewspecial issue, Fall 2005; Judged “Best Special Issue” 2005 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals). Work in progress includes Tactical Biopolitics, co-edited with engineer/artist Beatriz da Costa (MIT Press, forthcoming 2008).