Social science professor awarded global cooperation research fellowship

York University Professor Natasha Tusikov, in the Department of Social Science, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, has been awarded a three-month research fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany from May to July 2019.

The Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen is one of 10 Käte Hamburger Kollegs sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Established in 2012, the Centre is an interdisciplinary and international learning community that seeks to enhance understanding of the possibilities and limits of global cooperation and to explore new options for global public policy.

Tusikov’s fellowship is the result of a joint application with Blayne Haggart, professor of political science at Brock University. Haggart’s 12-month fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research will be from September 2018 to August 2019. Their research under the fellowship will focus on the theme “Global Cooperation and Polycentric Governance,” with a special emphasis on “Mapping the knowledge structure: The global political economy of knowledge in the digital age.”

Tusikov and Haggart’s application, selected in a highly competitive process from a pool of international candidates, is based upon their Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant research, “Internet Governance, Intellectual Property and the Exercise of Power in the 21st Century.”

Their research focuses on the governance challenges associated with digital spaces, and how the ubiquity of the internet and the resulting emphasis on the economic importance of data and knowledge is reshaping the power balance between state and non-state actors. In particular, their research traces the development of a global system of regulation of knowledge creation (intellectual property) and dissemination (internet governance) and shows how it is reframing the foundations of the global political economy.

This research will result in a book to be titled “Knowledge Wars: Data, Internet Governance, Intellectual Property and the Exercise of Power in the 21st Century.”