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Over the last decade piracy has emerged as a growing field of research covering a wide range of different phenomena, from fashion counterfeits and media piracy, through to 17th century buccaneers and present-day pirates off the coast of Somalia. In many cases piracy can be a metaphor or an analytical perspective to understand conflicts and social change. This article relates this fascination with piracy as a practice and a metaphor to academia and asks what a pirate methodology of knowledge production could be: how, in other words, researchers and educators can be understood as ‘pirates’ to the corporate university. Drawing on the history of maritime piracy as well as on a discussion on contemporary pirate libraries that disrupt proprietary publishing, the article explores the possibility of a pirate methodology as a way of acting as a researcher and relating to existing norms of knowledge production. The methodology of piratical scholarship involves exploiting the grey zones and loopholes of contemporary academia. It is a tactical intervention that exploits short term opportunities that arise in the machinery of academia to the strategic end of turning a limiting structure into an enabling field of opportunities. We hope that such a concept of pirate methodologies may help us reflect on how sustainable and constructive approaches to knowledge production emerge in the context of a critique of the corporate university.

This chapter aims to set the theoretical framework for this collection by challenging the established, liberal understanding of property. Second, it presents a theoretical overview of piracy. The chapter addresses how a better understanding of the commons allows to problematise the concept of property, which, as this collection highlights, is continuously destabilised through acts of 'piracy'. It discusses the process of enclosure not as an isolated act, but as part of an ideology that prioritises private ownership over the common good. The concept of the commons can be traced back to ancient Rome with discussions of the Res Communes. The immaterial conceptualisation spreads into the 'information commons' that has had a particular political impact in the copyright debates that emerged since the late 1990s. In response to the invisible and 'natural' processes of enclosure, the chpater debates that both the existence and reciprocated exchange of the commons is fundamental in the functioning of authentic and vibrant communities.

Since the 1990s the patenting a n d commodification of biological resources and traditional knowledge has become a contested phenomenon. This practice comes in many guises: it can be conducted by universities working in collaboration with local communities, by small commercial research companies or by multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Some call it biopiracy while others prefer the term bioprospecting or biodiscovery. The choice of words is significant as it reflects not only different ways to conduct and distribute the revenues from patenting of biological resources, but also different ways to look at the legitimacy of biopatents as such. This chapter takes the Nagoya Protocol – a UN protocol aiming to prevent biopiracy – as an example to discuss how the negotiations over bio patents also reflect different approaches to commodification of nature and the limits of propertization. Table of ContentsIntroduction: Property, Place & Piracy, Martin Fredriksson Almqvist and James ArvanitakisChapter 1: Commons, Piracy and the Crisis of Property, James Arvanitakis, Spike Boydell and Martin Fredriksson AlmqvistChapter 2: The Concept of the Commons in the age of extractionism: From sea to land to code, Martin Fredriksson AlmqvistChapter 3: Property, sovereignty, piracy and the commons: early modern enclosure and the foundation of the state, Sean Johnson AndrewsChapter 4: Unreal Property: Anarchism, Anthropology and Alchemy, Jonathan Marshall & Francesca da Rimini Chapter 5: Piracy and Mobility in Anglophone Atlantic Literature and Culture, Alexandra GanserChapter 6: An Attack to the Growth of the Imperial Body: John Locke, Colonial Piracy, and Property, Sonja Schillings Chapter 7: Piracy and the maritime commons, Amedeo Policante Chapter 8: Compensation in the Absence of Punishment: Rethinking Somali Piracy as a Form of Maritime Xeer, Brittany Gilmer Chapter 9: Creation and protection of private property rights by the state: an Australian case study, Ingrid MatthewsChapter 10: The Knitting Pirate: Craft as Resistance and Property Intervention, Johanna Dahlin Chapter 11: Piracy on the celestial frontier? The ‘NewSpace’ quest for the privatisation of the outer space commons, Matthew Johnson Chapter 12: Outer Space Property and Piracy, Kim EllisChapter 13: 'The Ancestry Land': Land Reclamation and China’s Pursuit of Dominance in the South China Sea, Jingdong YuanChapter 14: Nuclear Testing and the 'Terra Nullius Doctrine': From Life Sciences to Life Writing, Mita Banerjee Chapter 15: Biopiracy or bioprospecting: Negotiating the limits of propertization, Martin Fredriksson AlmqvistChapter 16: Pirate Places in Bangkok: the regulation of the urban vendor and market/mall-spaces, Daniel F. Robinson and Duncan McDuie-Ra Chapter 17: Gated Housing Enclaves in Ghana: Property, People, and Place, Franklin Obeng-Odoom Chapter 18: The Real Gruen Transfer - Enclosing the Right to the City, James Arvanitakis and Spike BoydellChapter 19: Epilogue, Martin Fredriksson Almqvist and James Arvanitakis Commons and Commodities: Knowledge, Natural Resources and the Construction of Porperty

This article draws on a series of interviews with members of the Pirate Party, a political party focusing on copyright and information politics, in different countries. It discusses the interviewees’ visions of democracy and technology and explains that copyright is seen as not only an obstacle to the free consumption of music and movies but a threat to the freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and a thriving public sphere. The first part of this article briefly sketches how the Pirate Party’s commitment to the democratic potential of new communication technologies can be interpreted as a defense of a digitally expanded lifeworld against the attempts at colonization by market forces and state bureaucracies. The second part problematizes this assumption by discussing the interactions between the Pirate movement and the tech industry in relation to recent theories on the connection between political agency and social media. Funding text: Helge Ax:son Johnson foundation; Olle Engqvist foundation; Ake Wiberg foundation; Lars Hierta foundation; Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) Piratkopieringens ideolog: En studie av piratkopiering, upphovsrätt och modernitet i Sverige, USA och Australien

"Piracy" is a concept that seems everywhere in the contemporary world. From the big screen with the dashing Jack Sparrow, to the dangers off the coast of Somalia; from the claims by the Motion Picture Association of America that piracy funds terrorism, to the political impact of pirate parties in countries like Sweden and Germany. While the spread of piracy provokes responses from the shipping and copyright industries, the reverse is also true: for every new development in capitalist technologies, some sort of "piracy" moment emerges. This is maybe most obvious in the current ideologisation of Internet piracy where the rapid spread of so called Pirate Parties is developing into a kind of global political movement. While the pirates of Somalia seem a long way removed from Internet pirates illegally downloading the latest music hit or, it is the assertion of this book that such developments indicate a complex interplay between capital flows and relations, late modernity, property rights and spaces of contestation. That is, piracy seems to emerge at specific nodes in capitalist relations that create both blockages and leaks between different social actors. PiracyLab

We are proud to present the fifth volume of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research. This time we have some important news to share. First, the journal’s scholarly success has been financially rewarded, in that Culture Unbound has received two different publishing grants: one from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and the other from the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS). Together these two grants cover most of the costs for Martin Fredriksson’s work as executive editor, which forms the core of our rather minimal costs. The remaining expenses are covered by our three collaborating host institutions at Linköping University: the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS), the Department of Culture Studies (Tema Q) and the Swedish Cultural Policy Research Observatory (SweCult).

Over the last decade piracy has become a source of constant debate. While copyright organisations describe piracy as simple theft, others regard it as a legitimate form of cultural consumption in a digital environment. Piracy is, however, not a phenomenon unique to digital media of the 21st century. This article takes the history of copyright and piracy as a starting point for a discussion about piracy as a cultural and political phenomenon that goes beyond the contemporary preoccupation with particular piratical practices such as file sharing. It seeks to show how copyright and piracy are integrated aspects of modern society, equally situated in the urban, social space of the modern city and the global, geopolitical landscape of colonialism in the past and the present. One might call it a study of how piracy is constituted in space over time. The article sets out with a short overview of the colonial heritage of copyright, followed by a discussion of the re-contextualisation of copyright within the structures of international trade relations in the 1990s, moving on to discuss how this positioned piracy within a postcolonial order of power. It concludes with a brief discussion of how piracy has become an integrated part of everyday life in contemporary, postcolonial cities and how this development reflects piracy's role in the process of late capitalist globalisation.

In June 2011 ACSIS arranged its fourth biennial conference on cultural research, this time on the subject “Current Issues in European Cultural Studies”. The conference provided an updated inventory of main issues in European cultural studies today, covering cross-European topics and trends as well as regional developments in East, West, South, North and Central Europé. The program had three main levels. First, a series of plenary sessions dealt with selected key current issues for cultural studies that partly connected to European perspectives and partly reached beyond this geographic scope. Second, a set of spotlight sessions opened up for presentations and debates on the state of cultural studies in different regions of Europé, leading up to a final plenary discussing whether EU’s motto “united in diversity” is also applicable to European cultural studies. Finally, about 200 cultural studies scholars from all over the world came together to present their own research in more than 30 parallel sessions. You can find the details on the participants in the Statistics for 2011 and if you really like figures you find statistics for all conferences in Statistics 2005-2011. The conference was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Wenner-Gren Foundations, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Linköping University and the City of Norrköping.

We proudly present the programme of our international conference ‘Current Issues in European Cultural Studies’! The conference is arranged by the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) which is a national centre for interdisciplinary and international networking in the !eld of cultural studies (www.acsis.liu.se). ACSIS has a wide range of activities, including the large biannual conference on cultural research that we have arranged since 2005. The great response to our !rst international conference ‘INTER’, in 2007 convinced us of the need for continuing to bring di#erent regions and thematic areas together on an international scale. This is why we have given the 2011 conference a broad European scope. Each of its plenary sessions focuses on a particular set of current issues, dimensions and perspectives for interdisciplinary, critical and cultural research in Europe. Our intention is to point at tensions and contradictions that together serve to map key contemporary directions in this complex !eld. What does Europe mean to cultural researchers today? How is cultural studies de!ned and how does it thrive or su#er in di#erent countries? What threats, challenges and opportunities are pivotal for us in the 2010s? The last plenary sums up a series of !ve ‘spotlight sessions’ that each gathers scholars into a panel to discuss the current state of cultural research in different regions of Europe : central, east, north, south and west. The latter is actually limited to British cultural studies, indicating that these regions are far from innocent concepts, and we expect critical debates around the very idea of dividing Europe in this manner! The European branch of the international Association for Cultural Studies ACS has kindly supported our efforts by letting their board members chair and take part in these spotlight sessions. Parallel to the spotlights a total number of 50 group sessions, including double sessions, involving more than 200 participants will take place. Conferences are not only work, they are also a great opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones. In addition to the discussions at the sessions, there will be plenty of time to socialise at the reception hosted by the city of Norrköping on Wednesday evening and the big conference dinner on Thursday night. Since the start these ACSIS conferences have provided a rich overview of the contemporary trends in cultural research, which our conference publications prove. We will continue this work and publish the conference proceedings, which are open to all conference participants, of this year in open access at Linköping University Electronic Press. More information about the proceedings will be distributed after the conference. Participants are also invited to submit articles to our refereed academic journal Culture Unbound : Journal of Current Cultural Research, published open access since 2009 by Linköping University Electronic Press. Culture Unbound is partly owned by ACSIS and as the journal’s publication history shows, it is a wonderful resource for publishing this kind of texts (www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se). The national board of ACSIS has served as a programme committee for the conference, and a great number of local supporters have assisted in preparing and organising the event. The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubileumsfond), the Wenner-Gren Foundations (Wenner-Gren Stiftelserna), Linköping University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the city of Norrköping have contributed with the funding needed to make this all possible. Last but certainly not least, we are enormously grateful for and impressed by the nonsalaried e#orts from all invited speakers, Panelists, moderators, session organisers and paper presenters who have !lled these frameworks with such fascinating intellectual contents. This programme book includes the full programme, abstracts, maps and various other kinds of information, ending with a list of participants and emails in alphabetic order. Welcome to Norrköping, to ACSIS and to the borderlands of European cultural studies! Johan Fornäs, Director of ACSIS, Södertörn University Johanna Dahlin, ACSIS conference organizer, Linköping University Martin Fredriksson, ACSIS research coordinator, Linköping University

”Inter: A European Cultural Studies Conference in Sweden” took place in Norrköping, Sweden, 11–13 June, 2007. It was organised by the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS), Linköping University’s national centre for interdisciplinary and transnational networking in this research field. Some 240 scholars participated from many parts of the world, with papers in almost 50 sessions, covering a wide range of subfields of cultural studies today. The plenary sessions focused on three main directions of border-crossing in late modern culture and cultural research. (1) Geographical relations between countries, particularly within Europe. (2) Historical interfaces between past and present, in processes of culturalisation whereby cultural aspect appear to become increasingly important and the past is put to use. (3) Interdisciplinary links between areas of research.