Conference: Contested Concepts of Property in Past & Present

Social conflicts over property arise against the background of historically contested concepts of property. In social and political conflicts about who owns what, there is always a social struggle about what counts as property and what does not. Concepts of property are contested in at least three ways. First, property rights take on historically specific forms of the private, the social, and the public. Second, these rights are shaped by different goods; property is held in infrastructures, energy, labor, knowledge, land, data, and nature. Third, property rights are embedded in a social context of appropriation, propriation, and expropriation. Goods are taken into possession, placed under a property regime, or transferred to new owners both with and without the consent of the old ones.

At the international and interdisciplinary conference of the Collaborative Research Centre Structural Change of Property, these contested concepts of property will be discussed using case studies that are socially and politically relevant for the present. These case studies include questions about the history of colonial appropriation as well as the restitution of colonial plundered art. In addition, the conventional practice of appropriating natural goods will be questioned in terms of climate policy. A history of expropriation shows that social developments have always been enabled by policies of dispossession. Inheritance societies, with their growing inequalities, raise questions about the temporal limits of property. Digital and financialized capitalism create new kinds of property structures that need to be understood and criticized. The debate over housing and urban space shows the urgency of testing alternative forms of property. The conference will conclude with a public panel discussion on the socialization of property.