Mother of invention

The idea of “invention” is a big one—so big, in fact, that it will take four universities to sponsor the Society for Critical Exchange’s upcoming Contexts of Invention conference, April 20-22, 2006, at Case Law School in Cleveland, Ohio.  Case’s Center for Law, Technology, and the Arts is one of the four sponsors, together with Harvard, Chicago, and American University.

Organizers are interested in just about every possible aspect of what it means to “invent.”  Click on “continue reading” for the Call for Papers.

CON/TEXTS OF INVENTION

A working conference of the Society for Critical Exchange
Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio
April 20-22, 2006

With support from the Center for Law, Technology, and the Arts at Case Western Reserve University School of Law; the History of Science Department at Harvard University; the Washington College of Law at American University; and the Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago

This conference interrogates the social and cultural construction of invention – the diverse ways in which invention has been conceptualized in the arts and sciences in the broadest sense, including literature, the fine arts, entertainment, the physical and life sciences, law, economics, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, communications, computation, finance, and business. Emphasis will be on the institutional cultures, rhetorics, and histories of invention across these fields. In this way the Society seeks to extend and deepen the inquiry of its long-standing project on “Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship“

Papers reflecting upon the impact of the “critique of authorship” will thus be especially welcome. The conference will include lectures and panel discussions; to facilitate discussion, papers selected for panels will circulate in advance of the conference.

TOPICS: Topics may include (but are not limited to):
– the author as inventor
– the inventor as author
– imitation and originality
– psychologies of creativity
– pathologies such as writer’s (or inventor’s) block
– genius
– hack(ing)
– tradition and the individual talent, including the anxiety of influence
– forgery
– crimes such as plagiarism and piracy
– the inventor as hero
– invention vs. discovery
– simultaneous discovery
– joint/collective invention
– useful and useless knowledge
– the idea/expression distinction
– invention vs. innovation
– material and social inputs to invention
– invention policy
– narratives of invention
– depictions of invention, including patent drawings
– invisible invention
– inventing organisms
– invention in rhetorical theory
– genre and invention
– invention and memory
– invention in popular and children’s literature
– pedagogies of invention
– invention and self-help, including creativity workshops and invention promotion services
– cross-cultural perspectives on invention
– invention and power
– imperialism and invention
– universities and invention
– rhetorics of entrepreneurship
– representations of collaboration
– corporate authorship/invention
– economies of invention
– legal incentives and disincentives
– private and public domains
– discourses of intellectual commons, including free software and open source
– collage and sampling
– geographies of invention
– ethnography of invention
– gender and invention

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:
Please send paper abstracts (no full papers please), a CV of no more than three pages, and any suggestions for panel topics by October 5 to this address.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:
Olufunmilayo Arewa, Law, Case Western Reserve University
Mario Biagioli, History of Science, Harvard University
Peter Jaszi, Law, American University
Adrian Johns, History of Science, University of Chicago
Martha Woodmansee, English and Law, Case Western Reserve University