Benjamin Birkinbine gets Smythe Award

IAMCR Newsletter | July 2014

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Benjamin Birkinbine, a doctoral student at School of Journalism & Communication of the University of Oregon, will be awarded IAMCR's 2014 Dallas Smythe Award for his paper "Incorporating the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Corporate Involvement in Free and Open Source Software".

Birkinbine’s paper analyses the case of free software and the commons. It traces the complicated power negotiation process between the media institution/corporation, Oracle, and audience commodity/free software users, the FLOSS community. The paper reflects a solid approach in political economy of communication and problematizes the strategy of digital labour resistance (or unpaid labour resistance) within the context of a disperse geographic community.

Ben Birbinkine will receive the award at a ceremony during IAMCR's 2014 conference in Hyderabad, India.

For more details and to download the paper, http://www.iamcr.org/node/1131