In contemporary societies, we witness an ongoing extension of property regimes to data, cultural knowledge, human reproductive capacities, rivers, plant varieties, ecosystem services, academic teaching materials, and research results. At the same time, long-standing objects of property, such as land and housing, have been turned into chains of financial titles, such as debts and shares, that are linked to new modes of profiting and of everyday practice. In each case, the objects of property are newly delineated, transformed, and linked in favor of certain rights of use, exclusion, and income streams; they are also subjected to different forms of care or neglect. In this conference, we take the specificity of objects as a vantage point for understanding contemporary property relations. The world is not a passive material that can be transferred seamlessly into different forms of property. The (potential) objects of property follow a logic of their own that shapes the possible forms of owning them. While nearly everything can potentially become property, the peculiar materiality of things might also defy propertization. By focusing on the “problematic objects” of property, we envisage the processes of coding and re-coding property, the limits of property regimes, as well as their contestations. Our discussions are structured by these aspects: Formatting and Re-Coding, Material Limits of Property, and Politics of Propertization.
Please register on our website: https://sfb294-eigentum.de/de/termine/slug=internationale-jahrestagung-problematic-objects-of-property/
