Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

As the fourth workshop of this year’s OSI, we are happy to announce “Cultural Productions, Contentious Properties,” which will be convened by Danilo Mandic and Cristina S. Martinez. This workshop will deal with some of the questions around copying, appropriation, authorship, and copyright that have become particularly prescient in the 21st century.

This workshop explores and challenges the contentious properties that both law and culture inform and perform. Considering different forms of cultural production and expression, it seeks an understanding of property rights, legal fictions, artistic practices of copying and appropriation. Taking as a point of departure Michel Serres’s notion of ‘appropriation through pollution’ and extending it to current case studies we will discuss and examine contentious claims and negotiations. To what extent are we in need to (or, bound to) discuss cultural production through legal structures? The relation between authors and users and the division between private and public maintain an ongoing tension between dichotomous viewpoints manifested in different spheres of cultural production, particularly as these are intensified by the proliferation of digital technology and the challenges it has introduced with regard to production, distribution and use of cultural expression. We will explore the legal concepts of property/ownership/appropriation, and question the extent to which the processes of relations/communication both precede and inform them with an attempt to understand and challenge the dominating and expanding proprietary principles of copyright.

We are very happy to announce that Leti Volpp will return to this year’s OSI as the second convenor of Workshop 2 “Claiming the Past, Belonging for the Future.” She is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, where her research focuses on questions of immigration and citizenship. She has served as a Visiting Professor affiliated with the Amerika-Institut of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and as past Faculty for the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of Law. Her honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, and the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award. She is a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

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