Piracy and Beyond: Exploring 'Threats' in Media and Culture

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.

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.

In case of any questions, please contact us at: piracyandbeyond@gmail.com.