This research cluster gathers work on the political economy of information inspired by the very rich range of Marxist scholarship from the Marx’s earliest manuscripts to the contemporary autonomist Marxism and beyond. Issues of interest include reappropriations of the concept of the commons—resources that all in a specified community may use, but none can own—which have become increasingly prominent in library and information science, having been recently revived by opponents of corporate globalization in their critiques of the privatization and commodification of informational resources. This cluster encourages Marxist analyses of historical and global regimes of information capitalism, from the print era of Marx’s time to contemporary cyber-capitalism.
Topics include:
- the 'informatization' of labour;
- digital surveillance and control technologies as instruments of capital;
- Marxist analyses of the operations of digitized biopower;
- Marxist analyses of digitized financial markets;
- information commons and enclosure;
- globalization and information capitalism;
- struggles over intellectual property and copyright; and
- information networks as alternatives and resistance to global techno-capitalism.
The following faculty members have research interests in this area (faculty member's program affiliation indicated in parentheses):
Dyer-Witheford, Frohmann, Pyati, Trosow.
[11/27/2008]