Thursday 7 February 2013 at 17:15
Oxford Intellectual Property Invited Speaker Seminar Series
Digital Technologies, Intellectual Property Reform and Ontological Politics in the Kenyan Recording industry
Speaker: Professor Georgina Born, Dr Andrew Eisenberg, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford
Venue: St Peter's College Dorfman Room
This paper explores the affects of the digital revolution and global intellectual property reform on the music recording industry in Kenya. Working from ethnographic data collected between July 2011 and August 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya, I examine how the practices and rationalities of the Kenyan recording industry are being reshaped by these two global processes. My analytical approach is shaped by two disparate scholarly literatures. One is a multidisciplinary body of work concerned with the role of intellectual property law in constructing subjects and objects with which that law is concerned (inter alia Bently, 2009; Kretschmer and Pratt, 2009; Woodmansee, 1984; Woodmansee and Jaszi, 1994); the other, coming largely from Actor-Network Theory, is concerned with ‘ontological politics’, the ways in which opposing parties to a dispute unconsciously and/or strategically construct disparate realities (inter alia Verran, 1998:238; Latour, 2002; Law, 2010; Mol, 2002). Drawing from these two literatures, I examine struggles over models of musical property rights in Kenya as, in Helen Verran’s (1998:238) words, struggles ‘over ontic and epistemic commitments…over what there is and who/what can know it’.
For more information please see the event website or contact: Jennifer Hassan
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Organised by Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre
