Bellamy's Rage and Beer's Conscience: Towards a Pirate Methodology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1793260Keywords:
piracyAbstract
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.
References
Aksikas, Jaafar & Sean Andrew Johnson (2014): 'Neoliberalism, Law and Culture: A Cultural Studies Intervention after "The Juridical Turn": Introduction', Cultural Studies, 28(5-6), 742-780.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.886479
Arvanitakis, James & Martin Fredriksson (2017) (eds.): Property, Place and Piracy, Routledge, London.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315180731
Bodó, Balasz (2015): 'Libraries in the Post Scarcity Era', Porsdam, Helle (ed.): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative Values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Farnham: Ashagate, 75-92.
Dennis, Michael A. (2016): 'Our Monsters, Ourselves: Reimagining the Problem of Knowledge in Cold War America'. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (eds.) Chicago/London: Chicago UP, 56-78: 57.
de Sutter, Laurent (2011). "Piracy as Method: Nine Theses on Law and Literature." Law and Humanities 5(1): 63-72.
https://doi.org/10.5235/175214811796219637
Drahos, Peter and John Braithwaite (2003): Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?, New York: The New Press.
Eilenberg, Susan (1989). 'Mortal Pages: Wordsworth and the Reform of Copyright'. ELH 56 (2): 351-374.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2873063
Fluck, Winfried (2011). 'Are Multiple Identities the Answer, or, How Do We Actually Live 'In-Between' Different Identities?' Winfried Fluck, Katharina Motyl, Donald E. Pease & Christoph Raetzsch (ed). States of Emergency - States of Crisis. REAL Yearbook in English and American Literature 27: 37-56.
Fredriksson, Martin (2015). 'Pirates, Librarian and Open Source Capitalists: New Alliances in the Copyright Wars', Helle Porsdam (ed). Copyrighting Creativity: Creative Values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property. Farnham: Ashgate.
Fredriksson, Martin & James Arvanitakis (2014) (eds.) Piracy: Leakages from Modernity. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books.
Fredriksson, Martin & Arvanitakis, James (2015). Piracy, Property and the Crisis of Democracy', Journal of democracy and Open Government. 7(1), 135-150: http://www.jedem.org/index.php/jedem/article/view/365 [accessed 29 April 2016]
https://doi.org/10.29379/jedem.v7i1.365
Fyfe, Aileen, Coate, Kelly, Curry, Stephen, Lawson, Stuart, Moxham, Noah, & Røstvik, Camilla Mørk (2017): Untangling Academic Publishing: A history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research: Zenodo, https://zenodo.org/record/546100#.WhSeiWMW38t (accessed 23/6/17).
Ganser, Alexandra (2017): 'Mobility in Early Modern Anglo-American Accounts of Piracy', Arvanitakis, James & Martin Fredriksson (eds.), Property, Place, Piracy, London & New York; Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315180731-7
Gilmer, Brittany (2017): 'Compensation in the Absence of Punishment: Rethinking Somali Piracy as a Form of Maritime Xeer'. Arvanitakis, James & Martin Fredriksson (eds.), Property, Place, Piracy, London & New York; Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315180731-8
Hall, Gary (2016): The Überfication of the University, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press: https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/4b7671d5-371f-438b-83c7-9275935550f8/1/ubercomb.pdf [accessed 11 August 2017].
Hammarfelt, Björn, Sarah de Rijke & Alexander D. Rushfjorth (2016). 'Quantified Academic Selves. The Gamification of Research through Social Networking Services', Information Research, 21(2): http://www.informationr.net/ir/21-2/SM1.html [accessed 26 November 2017].
Horn, Eva (2013): The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction. Evanston: Northwestern UP.
Johns, Adrian (2009): The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, Charles [Daniel Defoe] (1999): A General History of the Pyrates. Mineola: Dover.
Karaganis, Joe (ed.) (2011): Media Piracy in Emerging Economies. New York: Social Science Research Council.
Lind, Andreas (2017): 'Mediatization+Publication: A Podcast' Culture Unbound 9 (2)
Linebaugh, Peter & Marcus Rediker (2001): The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon.
https://doi.org/10.1177/084387140101300212
Lobato, Ramon (2014): 'The Paradoxes of Piracy', Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz (eds) Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Lobato, Ramon & Julian Thomas (2012): 'Transnational Piracy Research in Practice: A Roundtable Interview with Joe Karaganis, John Cross, Olga Sezneva and Ravi Sundaram', Television and New Media,13(5), 447-485.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476412443566
Masnick, Mike (2016): 'Just as Open Competitor to Elsevier's SSRN Launches, SSRN Accused of Copyright Crackdown', techdirt, 18 July 2016: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160517/13513134465/disappointing-elsevier-buys-open-access-academic-pre-publisher-ssrn.shtml (retrieved on 23 November 2017).
Naughton, John (2015): 'Aaron Swartz Stood up for Freedom and Fairness - and was Hounded to his Death', The Guardian, 7 February 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/07/aaron-swartz-suicide-internets-own-boy (retrieved on 22 December 2017).
Puzar, Aljosa (2010). "Piratical Cultural Studies: Transgressive Individualism Reconsidered." Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies,20 (10), 1-12.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708609354315
Van Noorden, Richard (2016): "Social-science Preprint Server Snapped up by Publishing Giant Elsevier", Nature 17 May 2016: http://www.nature.com/news/social-sciences-preprint-server-snapped-up-by-publishing-giant-elsevier-1.19932
https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.19932
Rediker, Marcus (2004): Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon.
Schillings, Sonja (2011): 'The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation: Somali Piracy, Discursive Containment, and the Creation of an Extralegal Space', Winfried Fluck, Katharina Motyl, Donald E. Pease and Christoph Raetzsch (eds), States of Emergency - States of Crisis. Tuebingen: Narr, 295-316.
Schillings, Sonja (2017): Enemies of all Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence. Hanover: UP of New England.
https://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_625275
Swartz, Aaron (2008): 'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto': https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt [accessed 24 July 2017].
Swist, Teresa & Liam Magee (2017). 'Research in Emergencies: Caring for Scholarly Knowledge Production through Ethical Executions of Code', Culture Unbound 9 (2).
https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1793240
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2018 James Arvanitakis, Martin Fredriksson, Sonja Schillings
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Copyright for all manuscripts rests with the author(s). The editors reserve the right to edit manuscripts. Contributors are responsible for acquiring all permissions from the copyright owners for the use of quotations, illustrations, tables, etc. Each author must, before final publication fill, in a publishing agreement provided by LiU E-Press.
Since 2021 Culture Unbound uses a Creative Commons: Attribution license for new articles, which allows users to distribute the work and to reform or build upon it without the author's permission. Full reference to the author must be given. For older articles please see each article landing page.