decolonizing copyright: Jamaican street dances and globally networked technology
Larisa Mann of Berkeley Law School / Boalt Hall
Tuesday, March 22, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
From Larisa:
My research is on culture, copyright law, technology and power, grounded in an ethnographic case study of Jamaican music-making practices. I situate a specific local culture of music-making within modern global colonial capitalism through examining music-making’s relationship to copyright law, in the context of increasingly pervasive globally networked technology. In this presentation I will show how the street dance, the explosively creative heart of Jamaican musical practice, suggests several ways that technology can serve as help or hindrance to people currently excluded from formal systems of power. I'm interested not only in "innovation" or "creativity" but innovation and creativity in the service of equality.
About Larisa
Along with pursuing my scholarly and policy interests at JSP, I am a dj and a journalist.
I'm interested in the social implications of intellectual property rules, copyright in particular, and in the legal implications of people's actual creative practices as explored through ethnographic and other qualitative research, as well as analyzing media accounts of copyright in popular press. I'm generally interested in grounding property rights debates in empirical research, especially examining the connection between enclosure movements and struggles over political/economic power.
In my work for the Samuelson Clinic for Law, Technology and Public Policy, I focused on issues of privacy in public places and the embedding of values/policy in technology design. My other strand of research is on the implications of networked life (daily life permeated by technology and the internet) for our concepts of rights.
In recent years, I've been a columnist for the progressive youth news site WireTap, and a resident DJ at Surya Dub, voted "Best Club Night in San Francisco 2007" by readers of the East Bay Express, and "Best Dance DJ" in the SF Bay Guardian's Readers Poll of 2008.
in Spring 2009 I was in Kingston, Jamaica, pursuing my dissertation research: "Listening to Law, Getting Law to Listen: Copyright and Creativity in Jamaica" In Fall 2009 I was continuing my research in the Jamaican Diaspora in New York, London and Toronto, Canada, and in Spring 2010 I am a Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Research Fellow.