Whew, it’s been A YEAR. A hard one, to be honest. Learning to take on a new role as a caregiver, which I was not exactly prepared for! Anyway, still managing to do some fun things. One of the best this year was presenting on my book at the 2023 Race & Intellectual Property conference at Pitt Law.
Organized by the absolutely inspiring Prof. Anjali Vats and Deirdre Keller, the two-day event was one of the best academic experiences I have ever had. Just witness the pic from day 2 (missing a few key people but representing the vibe well):
Not only was the conference kicked off by a panel of all global-south scholars, one of whom was Native American and two of whom were not men, not only was it a conference on IP law that was majority POC and Black and women with significant non-hetero participation as far as I could tell…
The QUALITY, and the RANGE was simply stunning. Work from lawyers and law professors, yes, but also music scholars, rhetoricians, activists, technologists and policymakers. And while there was a range of politics in the room, when one panelist began their presentation with “of course all roads lead to reparations” the room response was basically “naturally.”
The politics and realities in the room, at Pitt Law where Derrick Bell (one of the foundational Critical Race Theory scholars) used to be, also made me think of how many folks came from states like Texas and Florida where the foundations of their scholarship and activism are being banned and suppressed. We are going to have to develop and strengthen our support networks for people whose careers have unexpectedly become illegal, as well as our networks in general for supporting targets of rising white supremacist patriarchal christian fascism. (Who’s stockpiling mifeprestone or emergency travel vouchers? DO NOT TELL ME ABOUT HOW YOUR ARE DOING IT IN ANY WRITTEN FORMAT PLEASE I LOVE YOU )
I did livetweet the event, I will make a separate post with all of that. But it was truly extraordinary. I was also honored to be a part of a “New Books on Anti-Imperialist IP” alongside two amazing scholars, law professor Lateef Mtima of Howard Law School and the IP and Social Justice Project -editor of an enormous edited volume on IP and Social Justice, and musicologist Matthew Morrison speaking on his new book Blacksound which I can’t wait to read!!
Here is a hilariously recursive photo of our panel:
So glad to find so many dedicated, creative, thoughtful and interesting people involved in things I also care about. In the midst of all the wild times and collapsing supports these meetings are extra important.
I didn’t expect to feel that importance so viscerally. But I started my talk by reminiscing briefly about my last time in Pittsburgh which was to meet the amazing Staughton and Alice Lynd. Staughton models some of the very best in what a lawyer, a scholar, and human can be, having dedicated his life to racial and class justice.. it’s involved him getting fired many times as he continually dedicated physical and material SOLIDARITY, from going to Hanoi during the US War there, to moving to Youngstown OH to fight the mine closures, to supporting prisoners in the aftermath of the Lucasville uprising, the longest prison occupation in the US wherein Black and white prisoners controlled the prison together. Unexpectedly, I wept a bit, at the reminder of encountering someone so whole, so committed, and so clear - so much of our lives now are bound up in systems of power designed to make us doubt our values and our commitments or subsume them in a quest for power and security. People were kind about it, and I hope they understood that it’s at least partly the shock of connection and recognition, almost a kind of intimacy in recognizing our shared struggle. Of course feeling that in the midst of a pretty rough year didn’t help me keep it together, but luckily telling stories about the book grounded me a bit!