Assistant Professor of English Mike Edwards will present “Who Owns Your Information” at a Common Reading Tuesdays lecture on Oct. 9 at 7 p.m in Todd 130. This event is open to the public.
Edwards asks: How much do we own of the information we produce? How is it that Facebook and Google can harvest and sell the informational traces that users leave behind in interactions on the Internet, when the users are the ones creating that information? How can people benefit by writing papers and citing sources that other people have published? What do we mean when we talk about “intellectual property?”
His presentations is related to topics in the book that is being read and used in first-year classes of thousands of WSU freshmen this academic year, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
Edwards is senior chair of the Intellectual Property Caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, a national organization. He researches intellectual property concerns, the economics of writing in a digital age, and the rhetoric of technology. His Ph.D. is from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh.