Paper call - IP: Issues and Ethics

BRISBANE -- Policy Futures in Education (ISSN 1478-2103) is an international, peer-reviewed online-only journal that is committed to promoting debate on education among policy analysts, researchers, and practitioners from national and international forums, including members of policy think-tanks and world policy agencies such as the WTO, OECD, and the European Union.

We, Cushla Kapitzke & Michael A. Peter, are proposing a themed issue of PFIE to address developments in the burgeoning field of intellectual property (IP). The aim of the issue, “Intellectual Property: Issues and Ethics,” is to open a space for dialogue on global intellectual property agreements and laws that are framing standards of cultural and textual practice for the knowledge economy. Positively valenced discourses of innovation and creativity are used by government, business, and educational sectors alike to justify increasingly powerful regimes for the commodification of cultural activity.

This issue of PFIE seeks to appraise and trouble some of this upbeat, one-dimensional rhetoric. For example, the concept of universal “moral rights” and rules - a product of western epistemology - has significant social and economic implications for indigenous knowledges and cultures of majority world nations, some of whom have different understandings of intellectual and community capital than those assumed and promoted by IP regimes. Adequate access to cultural resources - their own and others - is crucial for the developing world’s entry and participation in the global economy. The proposed issue seeks to enhance understanding of tensions, contradictions, and disparities associated with developments in IP theory and practice across a range of social and cultural domains.

Contributions are invited for academic articles (6000 words), policy reports, reviews (1000 words maximum), and interviews from those seeking to participate in these debates. Critical theoretical and empirical accounts of opportunities and challenges that have practical local and/or global application are encouraged. Articles published will cover a wide range of topics highlighting the implications of IP for educational practice.

We anticipate that papers will draw from any combination of the following IP-related areas:

• Global agencies and agreements (e.g., TRIPS, WIPO)


• Copyright law


• Rethinking the autonomy and authority of authorship


• Property and/or Privacy


• Indigenous cultures and IP


• Culture after capital


• The state, public policy and governmentality


• Neoliberalism and the public domain


• Free trade agreements


• The Creative Commons


• Piracy through and on the digital waves


• Dispossession and symbolic cultural violence


• Cultural oligarchy, anarchy and democracy


• Open source and hacker culture

Manuscripts should be submitted as email attachments in RTF (Rich Text Format), but any major word-processor is acceptable. Further contributor information can be found on the journal’s website at:

http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pfie/

Please forward your abstracts or queries to Cushla Kapitzke - School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia:

c.kapitzke@uq.edu.au

Editor - Professor Michael A. Peters,
Universities of Glasgow, Scotland and Auckland, New Zealand
(m.peters@educ.gla.ac.uk or ma.peters@auckland.ac.nz)

Cushla Kapitzke
School of Education
University of Queensland
St Lucia 4072 Australia

Tel: 61-7-3365 6403; Mob. 0402 144466
Fax: 61-7-3365 7199
CRICOS Provider Number: 000025B
Website: http://www.uq.edu.au/kapitzke