The first workshop of the Working Group 2, Objects of Property, puts a central focus on objects of property and their ‘ownability’ (Eigentumsfähigkeit).
What is treated and regarded as an item of property, why, and how? The context in which these questions arise is hardly academic. There are booming global and local markets on new kinds of services, goods, and opportunities involving such things as citizenship, war, migrant smuggling, personal digital data, genetic resources, and body parts. At the same time, entities which have until recently been treated as freely available or unproblematic objects of property rights are recognized as having rights of their own and thus no longer available for human ownership claims – animals, trees, rivers and even whole ecosystems.
Where new markets expand, property rights are extended and restructured. New kinds of property claims are vigorously asserted or contested by the public, by economic actors and policy makers. Taking bodily services and organs as an example, many contend that framing bodily rights as property rights is not the way forward as some things should not be for sale. Others support property rights as sources of liberty, autonomy, self-reinvention, and, last but not least, sources of income and power for those who have been socially and politically marginalized. Concerning new kinds of resources extracted by digital, biotechnological, or extractive companies (data, genetic material, seabed or asteroid minerals), property rights are asserted to shield people’s control over resources and their use and to mitigate further dystopian exploitation of ‘the commons.’ Exclusion from the commons is a widespread means of maintaining structures of inequality dependent on notions of ownership and ownability.
In these real-world contestations and conflicts, nothing less is at stake than what kind of society we’ll live in and what the meaning of freedom, autonomy, equality, and distributive fairness is – as well as what the future of the life on Earth will be. The debates about what entities can be subject to ownership and property rights have always been more political than academic. In fact, the academic discussions about property outside of fields such as Black and Indigenous studies (including feminist theory) have so far failed to systematically address the question of property from the perspective of the ‘objects’ of property. Property research has focused on the justification of property in light of human interests, on the analysis of the bundle of property rights, and on the debates about economic benefits and distributive consequences of specific property regimes. Beyond studies of enslavement, examining the nature of ‘things’ which can (or cannot) be property and what enables them to become objects of property has not been at the center of mainstream property research. This workshop aims to contribute significantly to filling precisely this gap.
The main focus of the workshop is thus the ownability of objects – why and how do certain ‘objects’ become property and what changing circumstances (scarcity, vulnerability of goods or entities) and social, political, and cultural changes (changing lines of distributive conflict, value transformation) provide the background for claims of making and unmaking of property?
Focusing on particular property objects examined in the research projects – home and habitat, intellectual creations, genetic resources, natural resources, people, female reproductive abilities, wind and geothermal energy – participants are invited to reflect on the question sets for the workshop below: