Race + IP 2025: Abolitionist Futures is the fifth anniversary conference dedicated to exploring the intersection of race, coloniality, and intellectual property. Organized by a collaborative team of scholars and practitioners, the event is scheduled for April 17-19, 2025, at the University of Pittsburgh. The conference aims to foster interdisciplinary conversations that reimagine knowledge governance through frameworks emphasizing reparation without punishment.
Key topics include the application of abolitionist principles to intellectual property, the impact of race and colonialism on knowledge governance, and the development of alternative frameworks that promote equity and justice. Sessions will feature discussions on indigenous intellectual property, the role of social movements in shaping IP law, and the exploration of non-punitive mechanisms for protecting creative works.
Attendees can look forward to a keynote address by Celnisha L. Dangerfield, an Assistant Professor at Transylvania University, and panels featuring scholars such as Kara W. Swanson and Justin Koo. The conference will also offer networking opportunities, including a welcome reception and thematic workshops designed to encourage collaboration among participants.
This conference is ideal for scholars, activists, legal practitioners, and policymakers interested in the critical examination of intellectual property through the lenses of race and social justice. Participants will gain valuable insights into transformative approaches to IP law and have the opportunity to engage with leading voices in the field.
Speakers(37)
Aditya Gupta
Legal Researcher
Aditya Gupta specializes in intellectual property law, focusing on copyright and trademark policy. His work critically examines the role of intellectual property in shaping access to knowledge, market structures, and legal frameworks.
Aileen Editha
PhD Candidate and Robert Sutherland Fellow at Faculty of Law
Aileen Editha's doctoral thesis explores property rights over human biological and genetic materials. She has written on health law topics such as transplantation and blood banking, and is interested in interdisciplinary dialogues between Anthropology and Public Health.
Alexander Hartley
Ph.D. Student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University
Alex Hartley is a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at Harvard University.
Alveena Shah
Professor at Tulane University
Alveena Shah's research focuses on economic law, including colonial legacies in international market structures and international economic law. Her work explores financial markets and related legal regimes through lenses of critical race theory and feminist political economy.
Aman Gebru
Assistant Professor of Law at University of Houston Law Center
Aman Gebru's research explores the intersections of intellectual property law, knowledge governance, and cultural property. His recent projects theorize legal frameworks for communal authorship, cultural appropriation, and truthfulness in the trademark system.
Amanda K. Gross
Anti-Racist Organizer and Author
Amanda K. Gross is an intersectional anti-racist organizer and author of 'White Women, Get Ready: How Healing Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome Leads to Anti-Racist Change.' She integrates creative embodied practices into her organizing work and holds an MA in Conflict Transformation and a PhD in Expressive Arts.
Andrea Wallace
Associate Professor at University of Exeter
Andrea Wallace is Deputy Director of SCuLE and Co-Director of the GLAM-E Lab. She has a PhD in Cultural Heritage Law and her research focuses on the intersections of intellectual property, cultural heritage, and digital technologies.
Ashtin Berry
Activist, Educator, and Equity Consultant
Ashtin Berry is an activist, educator, sommelier, bartender, sociologist, and equity consultant. She utilizes diverse skills to develop a comprehensive educational platform and has been featured in various prestigious outlets.
Betsy Rosenblatt
Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at Case Western Reserve University School of Law
Betsy Rosenblatt teaches intellectual property courses including Copyright Law and Trademark Law. She volunteers as the Chair of the Legal Committee of the Organization for Transformative Works and focuses on intellectual property theory and intersections between intellectual property law and social justice.
Caitlin Bruce
Associate Professor of Communication at University of Pittsburgh
Caitlin Bruce investigates and helps create public art in urban spaces in transnational contexts. She has written three books and several articles and is a former Fulbright/comexus and Gerda Henkel fellow.
Celnisha L. Dangerfield
Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Communication at Transylvania University
Celnisha L. Dangerfield amplifies historically marginalized voices in her research by prioritizing the intersection of race, place, and gender. She focuses on how Black people find or create their own places of sanctuary, drawing inspiration from Sojourner Truth’s use of intellectual property to reframe narratives.
Daniel Oliveira
Professor and Researcher at Academy of the National Institute of Industrial Property of Brazil (INPI)
Daniel F. Oliveira's research areas include intellectual property, traditional knowledge, international political economy, international norms, anthropology, and identity. He is a member of the Support Network for Guardians of Biodiverse Knowledge and the Democracy Observatory from the Federal University of the Triângulo Mineiro.
Elena Baylis
Professor
Elena Baylis is an expert in post-conflict and transitional justice, focusing on topics such as protection and repatriation of cultural objects, reconciliation mechanisms, hybrid criminal courts, and crimes against humanity within the United States.
Felicia Savage Friedman
Founder and CEO at YogaRoots on Location
Felicia Savage Friedman has been transforming lives for over 30 years through her trauma-informed practice and teaching of Raja Yoga as an embodied pathway to collective liberation. She teaches liberatory frameworks and modalities through AntiRacist Raja Yoga Teacher Trainings and other programs.
Iris Gomez
Third-Year Law Student at Loyola University Chicago School of Law
Iris Gomez is an aspiring litigator who competed in the Saul Lefkowitz Trademark Moot Court Competition, where her team was named national champions. She has been involved in Loyola’s education law clinic and serves as Chief Justice of her law school’s Moot Court program.
Jack Lerner
Clinical Professor of Law and Director at UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, & Technology Clinic
Jack I. Lerner has written and spoken widely on copyright, freedom of expression, media law, and technology law. He is lead author of the Rap on Trial Legal Guide and the UCI Fair Use Jurisprudence Project.
Jasmine C. Abdel-khalik
Professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
Jasmine Abdel-khalik's research focuses on trademark and copyright law, examining how intellectual property doctrine may re-entrench existing stereotypes and biases, as well as the intersection of intellectual property laws and protection of speech.
Joseph Coppola
Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at University of California, Berkeley
Joseph Coppola is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar trained in English and Film Media Studies. His works appear in journals such as Screen, American Quarterly, and Film Quarterly.
Julia Choucair Vizoso
Independent Knowledge Producer and Co-founder at AbolishIP
Julia Choucair Vizoso is an independent knowledge producer and co-founder of AbolishIP. She is also Adjunct Professor of International Relations at IE University in Madrid and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Reform Initiative, focusing on environmental justice in the Middle East.
Julia Phuong Nguyen
Third-Year Law Student at UCLA School of Law
Julia Phuong Nguyen is a third-year student at UCLA School of Law, specializing in Critical Race Theory. They are exploring how concepts from fugitivity can serve as an alternative narrative to the racialized, liberal discourse on piracy.
Justin Koo
Tenured Senior Lecturer at University of the West Indies, St Augustine
Justin Koo specializes in copyright law, focusing on the communication to the public right in EU copyright law. His book, 'The Right of Communication to the Public in EU Copyright Law,' was cited by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Kali Murray
Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School
Kali Murray has written extensively in patent, administrative law, and property law. She is currently interested in intellectual property law as information and its relationship to the construction of social identity in the law.
Kara W. Swanson
Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Northeastern University
Kara W. Swanson's scholarship examines historical intersections among law, science, medicine, and technology, with particular attention to race and gender. Her work includes 'Centering Black Women: Passing and the Patent Archive' and 'Inventing the Woman Voter: Suffrage, Ability, and Patents.'
Kshitij Kumar Singh
Associate Professor at Campus Law Centre, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi
Dr. Kshitij Kumar Singh's primary area of interest is IP law and biotechnology law, particularly ethical, legal, and policy issues relating to biomedical technology, sustainable innovation, AMR, and precision medicine. He has published extensively on biotechnology law and patent law, focusing on human genetics and genomics.
Larisa Kingston Mann
Associate Professor at Temple University
Dr. Larisa Kingston Mann examines how marginalized communities use cultural practices to resist colonial power. Author of 'Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright and the Reverberations of Colonial Power,' she is also known as DJ Ripley in underground music scenes.
Leo Yu
Associate Clinical Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law
Leo Yu's primary research interests are Civil Rights, Critical Race Theory, and Law & Political Economy. His current projects focus on the dynamic between geopolitical tensions and the crisis of the American constitutional democracy, with a particular interest in the United States' perception of China's rise and its impact on domestic racial hierarchy.
Matthew Cannon
Ph.D. Candidate at UC Berkeley
Matthew Cannon's work on the politics of U.S. patent policy unites his background in law and social movements with nearly a decade of intellectual property litigation. He is conducting research on the emergence of an American inventor movement as a stakeholder in American patent policymaking.
Michael Madison
Professor of Law at University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Michael Madison is Faculty Director of the Future Law Project and a Senior Scholar with the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security. He is a co-Principal Investigator of the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons global research collaborative.
Nicholas Towns
First-Year Law Student at UC Irvine School of Law
Nicholas Towns is a first-year law student at UC Irvine School of Law with a background in biochemistry and chemistry. He is interested in the intersection of science and law, particularly in navigating institutions and cases like Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad.
Panagiotis Lampropoulos
Research Assistant at CREATe at the University of Glasgow
Panagiotis Lampropoulos is a Research Assistant with CREATe at the University of Glasgow, starting his PhD on the implications of moral rights, particularly the right of integrity, in the context of AI upscaling of films. His research interests primarily rest in copyright, especially critical theories and moral rights.
Sami Ahmad
MD/PhD Candidate at University of Pittsburgh
Sami Ahmad is investigating how metaphysical frameworks from the Islamic intellectual tradition can address key problems in modern medical education, bioethics, and the Philosophy of Science. His background spans cancer biology, Islamic Philosophy & Theology, and the History of Science, Medicine and Technology.
Sara Al Khashlok
Researcher in Labour Exploitation and Human Rights at British Institute of International and Comparative Law
Sara Al Khashlok holds an MSc in International Migration and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and an LLB from King’s College London. Her research focuses on examining the efficacy of legal frameworks in protecting the rights of marginalized communities, particularly in conflict zones.
Sileshi Hirko
Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Ottawa
Dr. Sileshi Bedasie Hirko's research focuses on legal fields concerned with intellectual property, regulation of competition, international trade, international business, digital technologies, and sustainable human development.
Tesh Dagne
Associate Professor at School of Public Policy and Administration
Dr. Teshager Dagne's research explores legal, ethical, and regulatory considerations in the challenges and opportunities that the deployment of Artificial Intelligence and related technologies bring in different spheres of activities.
Tomar Pierson-Brown
Assistant Professor of Law and Director of the Health Law Certificate Program at University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Tomar Pierson-Brown teaches civil procedure and education law. Her research applies elements of systems thinking and design approaches to address challenges in legal education and health justice.
Willajeanne McLean
Professor at University of Connecticut Law School
Willajeanne F. McLean teaches courses in Trademarks, Comparative Intellectual Property Law, and Torts. She has taught internationally and was a Fulbright Fellow at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, where she taught Comparative EU and U.S. Intellectual Property Law.
sarah huny young
Photographer and Visual Artist
sarah huny young is an award-winning photographer and visual artist primarily documenting and exalting Black womanhood and queer communities through portraiture and video. Her work has been featured in various prestigious outlets.
Event Details
- Date
- April 10-12, 2025
- 3 days
- Location
- 🇺🇸 Pittsburgh, United States
- University of Pittsburgh
- Audience
- Scholars, activists, legal practitioners, policymakers