Creative rights, copyright and culture: intellectual property in the arts and humanities
- Submission status
- Open
- Submission deadline
Questions of ownership, authorship, and creative control sit at the heart of contemporary cultural and artistic production. As digital technologies transform how cultural works are created, shared and consumed, the boundaries of intellectual property are being continually renegotiated. Originally designed for print-based literary culture, copyright law now intersects with remix practices, digitised archives, generative technologies, global distribution networks, and new forms of authorship that challenge traditional notions of originality. These shifts raise urgent ethical, cultural, and political questions about access, power, creativity, and the rights of makers and communities.
This Collection welcomes contributions that investigate how copyright and creative rights intersect with humanistic scholarship, cultural heritage, and artistic practice. We encourage submissions from across the humanities and social sciences, including literature, philosophy, cultural studies, publishing, media and film studies, art history, sociology, law, business, and related areas.
We invite papers that engage with topics including (but not limited to):
- Authorship and originality: evolving concepts of creativity; collaborative, collective and Indigenous authorship; the politics of attribution
- Copyright in digital culture: streaming, remix, memes, fanfiction, digital archives, and participatory cultures
- Cultural heritage and ownership: competing claims over artefacts, manuscripts, and artistic works; restitution debates and museum ethics
- Global and postcolonial perspectives: intellectual property in formerly colonised contexts; linguistic rights; cultural appropriation and cultural sovereignty
- Creative industries and labour: artist precarity, creative labour markets, and the economics of rights management
- AI, automation and creativity: machine authorship, data scraping, and the legal and ethical implications of generative technologies
- Open access: Creative Commons, open scholarship, fair use/fair dealing, and tensions between access and protection
- Legal narratives and cultural power: how copyright law constructs categories such as “author,” “work,” and “creativity”; the socio legal histories behind intellectual property regimes
- Case studies from literature, film, and visual arts: adaptation rights, translation rights, and the circulation of cultural forms
We particularly encourage interdisciplinary submissions, work that foregrounds marginalised or underrepresented voices, and research that challenges conventional understandings of ownership, creativity, and cultural value.
Editors
-
Georgia Jenkins, PhD
University of Liverpool, UK
-
Paula Westenberger, PhD
Brunel University of London, UK
-
Qinqing Xu, PhD
University of Manchester, UK
