Symposium and Call for Papers – IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections – Washington DC

American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property announces its 7th Annual Symposium on IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections, to be held April 16, 2010.

Over the past seven years, the IP/Gender symposium has provided a forum to examine and discuss research on gendered dimensions of intellectual property law. Because issues of gender in intellectual property have been under-appreciated and remain under-theorized, much of this work has been exploratory and pioneering. Topics discussed in past years have ranged from the impact of intellectual property law and policy on gender-related imbalances in wealth, cultural access, political power, and social control; creative production and gender; the effects of stereotyping and of actual and rhetorical feminization and masculinization of participant roles upon intellectual property stakeholders; the gendered development of IP doctrines and doctrinal categories; related issues in the teaching and practicing of intellectual property; feminist jurisprudential insights about intellectual property law; and female fan cultures and intellectual property.

The Spring 2010 symposium will again offer an opportunity to present and critique innovative research, related to the special theme, that is either currently underway or now under contemplation. As in previous years, anticipate the program and the audience will be highly interdisciplinary, including historians, social scientists, legal academics, cultural scholars, and practicing lawyers bringing their disciplinary perspectives to bear on the theme. A limited number of spaces is available on the program.

The coordinators invite proposals for papers on gender issues relating to the production and use of inventions, broadly defined. Appropriate topics might include: gendered patterns in the history of invention or creation; gendered regulation of inventive activities; gendered models of individual and collective inventive activities; gendered aspects in licensing or assignment of technologies; and related subjects. Abstracts should be received by Monday, October 30, 2009. Papers will be selected for presentation and possible publication by November 15, 2009, and will be due by March 1, 2010.

Additional guidelines and links to the web forms for submission are available at the conference website.