Transforming the Work of Geographical Indications to Decolonize Racialized Labor and Support Agroecology

Critical scholarship on geographical indications (GIs) has increasingly focused upon their role in fostering development in the Global South. Recent work has drawn welcome attention to issues of governance and sparked new debates about the role of the state in GI regulation. We argue that this new emphasis needs to be coupled with a greater focus upon local social relations of power and interlinked issues of social justice. Rather than see GI regimes as apolitical technical administrative frameworks, we argue that they govern emerging public goods that should be forged to redress extant forms of social inequality and foster the inclusion of marginalized actors in commodity value chains. In many areas of the world, this will entail close attention to the historical specificities of colonial labor relations and their neocolonial legacies, which have entrenched conditions of racialized and gendered dispossession, particularly in plantation economies. Using examples from South Africa and South Asia, we illustrate how GIs conventionally reify territories in a fashion that obscures and/or naturalizes exploitative conditions of labor and unequal access to land based resources, which are legacies of historical disenfranchisement. Like other forms of neoliberal governmentality that support private governance for public ends, however, GIs might be shaped to support new forms of social justice. We show how issues of labor and place-based livelihoods increasingly influence new policy directions within Fair Trade agendas while concerns with “decolonizing” agricultural governance now animate certification initiatives emerging from new social movements. Both initiatives provide models for shaping the governance and regulation of GIs in projects of rural territorial development that encompass principles of rights-based development to further social movements for rural social justice

La economía del conocimiento y sus culturas

Los bienes culturales son cada vez más significativos bajo las condiciones neoliberales de la restructuración regulatoria que favorecen la inversión en capital informacional en las llamadas “economías del conocimiento”. La argumentación de este artículo se presenta como un análisis crítico y multiescalar de la reciente investigación etnográfica en contextos latinoamericanos en los cuales podemos reconocer las maneras y medios a través de los cuales el comercio internacional, la propiedad intelectual y los regímenes de la biodiversidad han influido en las representaciones y la administración del conocimiento efectuando nuevas formas de espacialización. Colectivos sociales indígenas constituidos como comunidades autogerenciadas han adoptado actitudes de posesión, si no necesariamente de propiedad, respecto del conocimiento tradicional, los recursos genéticos de las plantas y las fuentes alimentarias, y han aprendido a marcar los bienes y los servicios de modo que se puedan identificar las condiciones culturalmente específicas de su origen. Pero en la medida en que las comunidades culturizadas se convierten en súbditos del gobierno neoliberal, son invitadas a proyectar sus capacidades distintivas de modo que se vuelvan económica y políticamente legibles para los nuevos interlocutores. Esto ha provocado nuevas formas de reflexión en torno a las capacidades, bienes, valores y normas, y ha provisto nuevas fuentes de luchas fundadas en los derechos en un campo emergente de políticas culturales, en el cual el multiculturalismo se vernaculariza en mercados más arraigados y sitios políticos más pluralistas.Cultural goods are increasingly significant under neoliberal conditions of regulatory restructuring that favor investments in informational capital in so-called “knowledge economies.” The argument is presented through a critical multiscalar survey of recent ethnographic research in Latin American contexts in which we can trace the ways and means through which international trade, intellectual property, and biodiversity regimes have influenced representations and management of knowledge to effect new forms of spatialization. Indigenous social collectives constituted as self-managing communities have embraced possessive, if not necessarily proprietary, attitudes toward traditional knowledge, plant genetic resources, and food sources, learning to mark goods and services to indicate culturally specific conditions of origin. As culturalized communities become subjects of neoliberal government, however, they are called upon to project their distinctive assets so as to make them politically and economically legible to new interlocutors. This has provoked new forms of reflexivity around assets, goods, values, and norms, and provided new resources for rights-based struggles in an emerging field of cultural politics in which neoliberal multiculturalism is vernacularized in more embedded markets and more pluralist polities.Los bienes culturales son cada vez más significativos bajo las condiciones neoliberales de la restructuración regulatoria que favorecen la inversión en capital informacional en las llamadas “economías del conocimiento”. La argumentación de este artículo se presenta como un análisis crítico y multiescalar de la reciente investigación etnográfica en contextos latinoamericanos en los cuales podemos reconocer las maneras y medios a través de los cuales el comercio internacional, la propiedad intelectual y los regímenes de la biodiversidad han influido en las representaciones y la administración del conocimiento efectuando nuevas formas de espacialización. Colectivos sociales indígenas constituidos como comunidades autogerenciadas han adoptado actitudes de posesión, si no necesariamente de propiedad, respecto del conocimiento tradicional, los recursos genéticos de las plantas y las fuentes alimentarias, y han aprendido a marcar los bienes y los servicios de modo que se puedan identificar las condiciones culturalmente específicas de su origen. Pero en la medida en que las comunidades culturizadas se convierten en súbditos del gobierno neoliberal, son invitadas a proyectar sus capacidades distintivas de modo que se vuelvan económica y políticamente legibles para los nuevos interlocutores. Esto ha provocado nuevas formas de reflexión en torno a las capacidades, bienes, valores y normas, y ha provisto nuevas fuentes de luchas fundadas en los derechos en un campo emergente de políticas culturales, en el cual el multiculturalismo se vernaculariza en mercados más arraigados y sitios políticos más pluralistas

What is Feminist About Open Access?: A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy

In a context of great technological and social change, existing intellectual property regimes such as copyright must contend with parallel forms of ownership and distribution. Proponents of open access question and undermine the paradigm of exclusivity central to traditional copyright law, thereby fundamentally challenging its ownership structures and the publishing practices these support. In this essay, we attempt to show what it is about the open access endeavour that resonates with a feminist theory of law and society - in other words, we consider what is “feminist” about open access. First, we provide an overview of a relational feminist critique of traditional copyright law and the assumptions of possessive individualism that pervade it. We then offer a brief description of the open access movement and the way in which it reflects or responds to this criticism. In doing so, we discover vital synergies between this branch of feminist legal theory and the open access movement. Ultimately, we hope to underscore the importance of an open access policy for legal journals such as this one, whose mission is to support, advance and disseminate a feminist perspective that challenges the prevailing hegemony within traditional legal scholarship. We conclude by offering ways in which this journal can help draw out the synergies between feminist criticism and the open access movement

What is Feminist About Open Access?: A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy

In a context of great technological and social change, existing intellectual property regimes such as copyright must contend with parallel forms of ownership and distribution. Proponents of open access question and undermine the paradigm of exclusivity central to traditional copyright law, thereby fundamentally challenging its ownership structures and the publishing practices these support. In this essay, we attempt to show what it is about the open access endeavour that resonates with a feminist theory of law and society - in other words, we consider what is “feminist” about open access. First, we provide an overview of a relational feminist critique of traditional copyright law and the assumptions of possessive individualism that pervade it. We then offer a brief description of the open access movement and the way in which it reflects or responds to this criticism. In doing so, we discover vital synergies between this branch of feminist legal theory and the open access movement. Ultimately, we hope to underscore the importance of an open access policy for legal journals such as this one, whose mission is to support, advance and disseminate a feminist perspective that challenges the prevailing hegemony within traditional legal scholarship. We conclude by offering ways in which this journal can help draw out the synergies between feminist criticism and the open access movement