Research

Annany Aguilar is a Mellon Teaching Fellow in Michaelmas Term 2016.

Academia meets industry: creating long-term collaborations

Through a case study on the music industry, this course will reflect critically on collaborations between academia and industry. It will do this by engaging in direct conversation with some of its stakeholders: from music producers and distributors, to users, unions and government. It will examine the multiplicity of voices, including that of scholarship, their differing perspectives and stakes in the business of making music. By working within a multi-disciplinary team on possible directions emerging from a widely publicised contemporary challenge, this course will seek a better understanding of how collaborations between academia and industry may be sustained in the long-term and, importantly, will provide an opportunity to bring the students' own expertise to bear on this debate.

About

Ananay is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Music working in collaboration with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) at the Faculty of Law on a project entitled ‘Performers’ Rights: making music in the digital era’. By placing performers' rights at the centre of the discussion, the project responds to criticisms to copyright law for privileging Romantic ideals of classical music that pay excessive tribute to the author. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork with performing musicians and industry and government representatives, Ananay takes into account 1) the history of these rights, 2) how performers make use of the law in everyday practice and through case law, 3) how the rights are managed and finally, 4) the processes involved in legislative change through a case study on the recently launched Fair Internet for Performers Campaign.

In 2015-16 Ananay offered a third-year course on the music industries in the digital age that considered aspects such as social media and crowd-funding, the battle for the 'celestial jukebox', and the role of trade associations and collection societies, within debates in the field of creative labour and copyright law. In Michaelmas 2015, she delivered a module on influencing policy as part of the Public Policy Engagement Programme of the Cambridge Doctoral Training Programme in partnership with RAND Europe.

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

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