Last Year's CCCC Proposals

Since the call has gone out for proposals for next year's CCCC, here are the proposals for this year's business meeting and sponsored panel in case they contain anything that can be recycled. Both proposals were converted from PDFs generated by the proposal website, so my apologies if any misspellings crept in during the conversion.

Following the roundtables, participants will reconvene to share their plans and recommend actions for the coming year. The business meeting also will discuss progress toward publishing a collection on key IP developments within the last 10-15 years and submission of a NCTE-sponsored grant for an IP-related research project. Attendees are also encouraged to inquire about mentoring opportunities for junior scholars and graduate students.

Proposal Annotation:

The CCCC-IP Standing Group annual meeting provides a forum for discussions of authorship, copyright, fair use, remix, access, and IP issues via roundtables that explore composition instruction on intellectual property, discuss scholarly strategies and resources, and create action plans on current events and issues.

Cluster:

Community, Civic, and Public Contexts of Writing

Proposal Level:

All 

CCCC Additional Info 

Standing Group or Special Interest Group Meeting

Please select a day for your Standing Group or Special Interest Group Meeting

Wednesday

_______________________

Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation: Decolonizing Intellectual Property

Conference:

CCCC Convention 2022

Abstract No:

4575

Session Type:

Standing Group Sponsored Panel

Primary Presenter:

Clancy Ratliff

University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Co-Presenter(s):

Kim Gainer 

Radford University 

Laurie Cubbison 

Radford University 

Wendy Austin

Wenzhou-Kean University

Proposal Description:

The history of writing is one of appropriation. Early written texts show traces of preceding oral traditions; later written texts incorporate and reinvent earlier ones. The same is true of music, dance, painting, fashion, architecture-indeed, of all the plastic and performative arts. It may be neither possible nor desirable to read a text, listen to a song, or watch a movie without being aware of its relationship to a previous one. Intellectual property issues may come into play whenever an appropriated work is under copyright, but accusations of misappropriation may be made in cases of works derived from content not under copyright. The phrase "cultural appropriation" is applied when members of one group use elements claimed by members of another group as integral to their culture even when not subject to copyright under current law. Frequently a power imbalance exists, with dominant groups appropriating or colonizing cultures of marginalized groups. According to Richard A. Rogers ("From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation"), cultural appropriation can be "defined broadly as the use of a culture's symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture" (474). Rogers identifies four types of cultural appropriation. One, cultural exchange, takes place within the context of reciprocity, an interaction "between cultures with roughly equal levels of power" (477). A second type, transculturation, is characterized by intermingled contributions from several groups that make it impossible to identify a source culture-and power imbalance-in any meaningful sense. However, two types of cultural appropriation do entail power imbalances. In cultural dominance, one culture forces another to adopt foreign elements, e.g., the forced removal of Native American children from their families to boarding schools in which they were forbidden to speak their native languages, wear traditional garb, or celebrate indigenous religious practices. Finally, cultural exploitation is "the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or compensation" (477). The phrase cultural appropriation now in common usage usually signals that appropriation is viewed as exploitative. This panel will discuss examples of cultural exploitation in the context of debate over what is meant by cultural ownership and how policy and pedagogy are impacted when one group's culture may have been appropriated by another. Speaker 1 uses Anjali Vats's ideas in The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans to discuss an incident of "audio blackface" from 2020 in which Fireside Magazine hired a white man to do the audio reading of Regina Bradley's essay about Outkast and other Black musicians. Speaker 2 will discuss how non-white or non-binary populations pushed back against decisions by corporate media to cast white or cis-gendered actors for characters from racial or gender minorities, followed by pushback from white fan communities objecting to the casting of minority actors as characters fans perceived, often incorrectly, as white. Speaker 3 will discuss ownership of supposed common culture. Given the multiplicity of World Englishes, each embedded in a specific culture, who, if anyone, determines what is 'common knowledge' and what protocols must be followed for documentation practices in composition, business, or technical writing? Speaker 4 will address current and proposed legal protections for cultural property but also the question of whether the legal approach is viable or desirable, as well as raise questions about the role educators can play in helping students navigate the tension between remix culture and respect for cultural elements that are not their own.