[Commlist] CFP: Piracy and Beyond: Exploring ‘Threats’ in Media and Culture

call for papers

*Piracy and Beyond: Exploring ‘Threats’ in Media and Culture*

*School of Media, Faculty of Media, Communication and Design*

*National Research University HSE, Moscow*

*23-25 October 2019*

*Keynote Speakers*

Göran Bolin, Södertorn University, Sweden

Patrick Burckart, University of Texas – Austin, US

Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub

Joe Karaganis, Columbia University, US

Tristan Mattelart, University of Paris Pantheon, France

Vincent Mosco, Queen's University, Canada

**

*Call for Papers*

This conference explores piracy as a figure navigating the conventions, 
norms and boundaries of legality in digital cultures and beyond. Offline 
and online piracies thrive on technological affordances yet they do so 
in opposition to corporate efforts -in music, film, publishing and 
academia- to label them as threatening for the economy and society. In 
turn, pirate activities frequently become themselves subject to economic 
exploitation, co-optation and spectacurilzation by market forces. During 
the last decades, while the copyrights industry lobbies for tighter IP 
laws on a global scale, social media corporations find productive ways 
to capture counter-hegemonic networks through the exploitation of free 
or leisure time and users’ data. Caught in the highly flexible and 
contingent context of digital networks, piracy allows for the probing of 
norms and boundaries, questioning the logics that define intellectual 
property laws, broadening the uses and perceptions of authored 
production and enabling new forms of technology usage surpassing 
corporate control. Moving beyond approaches that represent piracy in 
terms of illegality or supply and demand, we propose to 
explore pirate networked sociabilities working within and outside the 
fringes of market economy through the lens of institutional and 
discursive power and attempts to escape corporate control.

The discourse on piracy can be seen as part of a broader set of 
discourses and practices shaping the figure of the threat in media and 
culture, that is to say the construction of borderline and contested 
practices, identities and phenomena that rest on the threshold of the 
legitimate and illegitimate, the legal and the illegal. We understand 
these boundaries to be highly contingent, historical and politically 
defined and subject to discursive contestation. To bring few examples 
beyond digital piracy, the figures of the ‘parasite’ in biology, the 
‘virus’ in digital worlds or the ‘benefit scrounger’ in public discourse 
become likewise threats that have to be managed and confronted for the 
presumed progress of the community. We look for abstracts that explore 
the threat as a broader phenomenon related to issues of political 
economy, otherness, marginality, resistance, community, assimilation, 
camouflaging, gender, class, recognition and representation. We seek to 
address the power relations in designations of the threat (who, why, 
when and by whom is someone categorized as a threat) as well as explore 
the conditions under which authorities and legal entities decide who has 
the right to exist and how.

We welcome contributions in the following topics:

Legality, Illegality and Sharing Economies

Political Economy of Othering

Disruption and the New Economy

Academic Publishing and Piracy

Art, Music and Piracy

Discourses on Disruption

Ecosystem and Disruption

Gender, Class, Sexual Others

Viruses and Parasites in Media

Human and Non-Human Worlds

Submissions should include the name(s) and institutional affiliations of 
the applicant(s), email address and abstracts no longer than 500 words 
(including references) in English or in Russian.

Abstracts must be submitted before *March*, 31, 2019** at: 
(piracyandbeyond /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(piracyandbeyond /at/ gmail.com)>

Participants will be notified about acceptance by* April 31, 2019*

For any further information, please contact us at: 
(piracyandbeyond /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(piracyandbeyond /at/ gmail.com)>

*Organizers *

Ilya Kirya, Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Yiannis Mylonas, Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Panos Kompatsiaris, Higher School of Economics, Moscow




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