Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)

About this episode

The episode discusses the book 'Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property' which explores the implications of knowledge ownership and its relationship with inequality in society.

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society. Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership. Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order. The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent…

People in this episode

Guest: Dagmar Schäfer

Topics covered

• knowledge ownership
• intellectual property
• inequality
• technology
• global history of knowledge
• case studies

Keywords

• knowledge
• ownership
• intellectual property
• inequality
• technology
• case studies
• global history

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MIT Press

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