ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship

Building on historical work that looks at how intellectual property law dealt with earlier examples of dematerialisation, particularly in relation to organic chemistry, early computing, and plant innovations, this project will consider the impact that the dematerialisation of biological science is having on intellectual property law and what some of the possible responses might be.

The aim of this project is to explore the interaction between plant variety protection, the creation of new types of contractual relationships for its enforcement, and concerns about traceability of germplasm that have arisen as a consequence.

This project investigates the complex interrelationship between food regulation and trade mark law in the United States and the Australia/Asia Pacific region.

This project considers how an insistence on radical incommensurability between intellectual property and ‘other ways of being’ might elide points of connection in the ways that different social actors construct ideas about ownership or advance claims to important resources.

This project explores what it means to talk about intellectual property and agriculture. In the first instance, it looks at a series of laws and practices that pre-date the emergence of modern intellectual property law around the turn of the twentieth century.

By focusing on the process of movement and translation along the food chain, we hope to get a better understanding of how intellectual property law creates new juridical spaces, re-organises the social relations of production, and allows for new types of techno-scientific interventions.

The aim of this project is to investigate the realm of what scholars have called the ‘unused policy space’ that exists in intellectual property lawmaking to achieve these ends. The project builds upon the idea that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution for tackling the complex range of problems faced by actors across disparate food and agricultural systems.