Hyo Yoon Kang

Reader/Associate Professor

Intellectual Property; Political Economy; History of Science; Science and Technology Studies; Legal Theory; Social Theory; Literary Theory; Media Theory

School of Law
B1.12, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

024 765 74784

Scholarship

Hyo Yoon Kang's research is multi-disciplinary and focuses on intellectual property, knowledge techniques, transmissions and practices, construction of values and valuation practices, concepts of novelty and innovation, and legal and social theory. She studies legal techniques and their social implications by drawing on insights from anthropology, literary and social theories, historical epistemology, media studies, and science and technology studies.

Examples of her past work include: an analysis of patent knowledge organisation and the material infrastructure that sustains it; the digital mediation of intangible knowledge; a critique of patent value; an analysis of financialisation of patents as assets; representations in climate data in legal adjudicatory setting and legal scholarship; theorisation of legal materiality; assessment of IP obligations during the Covid-19 pandemic; the cultural function of patents in the capitalist economy.

Hyo Yoon's policy-oriented work draws upon insights from interdisciplinary and historical IP scholarship, providing a deeper context towards a more equitable policy outcome. From 2020 to 2023 she researched and collaborated with IP law colleagues on the issue of the TRIPS waiver, a proposal to waive IP obligations on medicines and technologies needed to combat Covid-19 for the duration of the pandemic. She co-authored a research article and drafted a letter in support of the TRIPS waiver together with her IP law colleagues, which was signed by over hundred international leading IP scholars.

In the academic year 2024-5, Hyo Yoon will work as a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow on the project "The Role of the State in Intellectual Property Law in Times of Industrial Policy". The project will examine the perceived dichotomy between public and private interests that underpin the justification of patent law. It will delineate and query the relationship between patent law and various forms of state capitalism and degrees of state capture by private interests. The project will draw upon her expertise in IP law, theory, and history with critical political economy.

From 2018-2023, she was the UK principal investigator at Kent Law School for the multidisciplinary European Research Council research project on Patents as Scientific Information, led by Prof Eva Hemmungs-Wirtén (Linköping University, Sweden). Hyo Yoon's research considered how patents have turned into capitalist aesthetic forms, combining an analysis of patent politics with insights from media theory and critical literary theory.

Within the field of legal theory, Hyo Yoon co-led the AHRC-funded ‘Legal Materiality’ research network (2017-2020) together with her colleague, Dr Sara Kendall (Kent). The project resulted in multiple contributions to discipline-shaping handbooks, as well as an open-access special issue of the journal Law Text Culture, which advanced in-depth analyses and novel theorisations of legal materiality.

Beyond Warwick, Hyo Yoon serves as the Co-Director of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP).

She was the Programme Committee Co-Chair for the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities (ASLCH) and served in its Organizing Committee from 2018 until 2023.

She also serves on the editorial boards of the journals, Economy and Society and Journal of Cultural Economy.

Bio

Education

PhD, Law, European University Institute, Florence, Italy

LLM, London School of Economics and Political Science

BSc, Law and Government, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Visiting research fellow at University of California at Berkeley (2002-3) & LSE (2013) & UNSW (2024)

Dr Kang has a cross-disciplinary training and professional background in law, history of sciences, and science and technology studies. She read Government and Law at the LSE, where she also received an Masters in Law with Distinction. Her PhD at the European University Institute researched the meaning of human personhood in the context of patents related to human genes. Subsequently, Hyo Yoon was a postdoctoral fellow researching the relationship between scientific and legal classifications at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, at Prof Hans-Joerg Rheinberger’s Department III.

Prior to her time in academia, she trained in classical music and financial analysis.

Teaching

Prior to joining Warwick Law School, Hyo Yoon was a Reader in Law at Kent Law School where she co-directed the LLM specialisation in Intellectual Property Law, and taught and developed undergraduate and postgraduate courses in intellectual property law with a distinctive interdisciplinary approach.

Before Kent, she worked as an Assistant Professor of Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, and developed courses in Law, Science, and Society; Biotechnology and New Reproductive Technologies; Can Computers Act? Sciences and the Question of Agency; Donna Haraway: Theory and Engagement.

At Warwick Law School, she teaches intellectual property law at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Languages

English, German, Korean (main languages); French (reading), Italian (reading), Latin (reading), modern Greek (beginner).

Publications

Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2023. Patents as capitalist aesthetic forms. Law and Critique
Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2023. Is there (should there be) a law & humanities canon?. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 19 (1), pp. 60-76
Thambisetty, Siva, McMahon, Aisling, McDonagh, Luke, Kang, Hyo Yoon, Dutfield, Graham, 2022. Addressing vaccine inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic : the TRIPS intellectual property waiver proposal and beyond. The Cambridge Law Journal, 81 (2), pp. 384-416
Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2019. What if all we can see are the parts, and there is not a whole : elements and manifestations of the making of law of 'climate justice'. Law Text Culture, pp. 138-170
Kang, Hyo Yoon, Kendall, Sara, 2019. Introduction. Law Text Culture, 23, pp. 1-15
Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2019. Ghosts of inventions : patent law's digital mediations. History of Science, 57 (1), pp. 38-61
Bellido, Jose, Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2016. In search of a trade mark : search practices and bureaucratic poetics. Griffith Law Review, 25 (2), pp. 147-171
Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2015. Patent as credit : when intellectual property becomes speculative. Radical Philosophy, 194, pp. 29-37
Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2012. Science inside law : the making of a new patent class in the International Patent Classification. Science in Context, 25 (4), pp. 551-594
Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2006. An exploration into law and narratives : the case of intellectual property law of biotechnology. Law and Critique, 17 (2), pp. 239-265

Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2022. Writing from within the body as a research process. In Herman, Didi; Parsley, Connal (eds.), Interdisciplinarities: Research Process, Method, and the Body of Law, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 107-126
Kang, Hyo Yoon, Kendall, Sara, 2020. Legal materiality. In Stern, Simon; Del Mar, Maksymilian; Meyler, Bernadette (eds.), Oxford Handbook for Law and Humanities, Oxford University Press, pp. 20-37
Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2020. Patents as assets : intellectual property rights as market subjects and objects. Birch, Kean; Muniesa, Fabian (eds.), Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press
Kang, Hyo Yoon, 2018. Law's materiality : between concrete matters and abstract forms, or how matter becomes material. In Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory, London, Routledge, pp. 453-474

Teaching Events

SELECTION

For full list of events and presentations, please see here.

May 2024 – University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia – Visiting Research Fellow.

29 May 2024 - University of New South Wales Faculty of Law & Justice and Initiative for Biolegalities Seminar on "The Politics of Intellectual Property Law Scholarship in the Covid-19 Pandemic: the Example of the TRIPS Waiver"

December 2023 – University of Amsterdam. Workshop on “Gender & Race in Law and Political Economy in Europe – Critical Engagements with European Perspectives” organised by Dr Ivana Isailovic. Speaker.

22-23 June 2023 – Association of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, University of Toronto Law School.

Two paper presentations on ‘Should there be a law and humanities canon?’ & ‘What if all we can see are the parts, and there is not a whole: the blind spots of seeing “climate justice” ‘

6 – 9 June 2023 – Keynote Lecture at Summer School on ‘Probing Innovation: Prospecting, Valuing, and Negotiating Fictions’

University of Lausanne STS Lab and University of Padova STS Department, P.A.S.T.I.S.

11 May 2023 – South Centre Geneva - Roundtable (online) on Data Governance. Commentator.

9 May 2023 – Society of Legal Scholars Intellectual Property Section. King’s College, London. Early Career Researchers Workshop. Commentator.

26-28 April 2023 – European Research Council PASSIM project. Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium. Graduate student workshop ‘Patent Futures’.

21 March 2023 – Invited speaker for the legal philosophy and theory graduate seminar, Free University Brussels.

Paper on Legal Materiality.

Impact

Policy

- May 2022: Amicus Curiae Brief for Knowledge Ecology International's compulsory license application for Paxlovid at the Puerto Rico Intellectual Property Office.

- October 2021: Panelist in 'The Way Forward on and Beyond the TRIPS Waiver Proposal’, organised by the civil society organisation, Health Justice Intiative, and hosted by the Mandela Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, together with Mr. Tahir Amin, iMAK Initative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, Ms. Sangeeta Shashikant, Third World Network, Dr. Carlos Correa, Executive Director of the South Centre, Dr. Alexander Beyleveld, Mandela Institute.

Organisation and moderation: Ms. Fatima Hassan, the Founder of the Health Justice Initative.

My talk focused on the role and responsibility of IP scholarship as they have been acutely crystallised in this pandemic.

- Open Letter by over 180 International IP Academics in Support of the TRIPS Waiver, released 12 July 2021.

Available on the website of International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property: https://www.ishtip.org/?p=1186 or as LSE Policy Briefing Paper, No. 46: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3885568#

Public Understanding

22 February 2023 -- University of Sussex (UK) Development Lectures 'Vaccine Apartheid, the TRIPS moment, and non-alignment as a form of commoning' Panel Speaker.

16 June 2021 -- Open Public Event: Law On Trial – Pharmaceutical Patents And Pandemics: Public Health And Private Wealth?
Birkbeck, University of London

15 June 2021 -- Open Public Event: Roundtable on Engineering Vaccine Equity and the Future of Global Health Innovation
UCL Anthropocene

What changes need to happen both to reduce the threat of pandemics on a similar scale, and to address the problem of vaccine equity?

Roundtable with Gustavo Matta (Fiocruz), Priti Patnaik (Geneva Health Files), Penny Carmichael (UCL), Hyo Yoon Kang (University of Kent), Andrew Barry (UCL) and Paige Patchin (UCL)

Professional Practice

Service to Scholarly Societies

2023-2028

Co-Director of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP): www.ishtip.org

2018- 2023

Member of the Organizing Committee for the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities: https://lawculturehumanities.com/about-lch/

Academic Service

Member of the Editorial Board of Economy and Society

Member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Cultural Economy

Advisory Board Member of the AHRC Research Network 'Choreography of Consent: Dance, Law and Consent (Project Investigators: Marie-Andrée Jacob and Anna Macdonald | June 2024 - June 2026)

Event Organisation (Selection)

May 2022 - European Research Council project ‘Patents as Scientific Information’ workshop on Patents as Capital, Norrköping, Sweden. (co-organiser)

1 July 2021 - A Panel Discussion on The State of Intellectual Property Law Scholarship and Pedagogy in Times of Covid-19 Pandemic. (Center for Social Critiques of Law, Kent Law School, University of Kent)

4 May 2020 - Panel Discussion ‘Patent Capital in the Covid-19 Pandemic’. Hyo Yoon Kang (Kent) in conversation with Mario Biagioli (UCLA) and Javier Lezaun (Oxford). Hosted by International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property and ERC Project Patents as Scientific Information.

Culture

- Advisory board member of the European Research Council-supported Children’s Photography Archive, led by Melissa Nolas and Christos Varvantakis: https://childphotoarchive.org/

- Co-sponsor and content moderator for zirk.us, a Mastodon server for arts and humanities community. Profiled in The New Yorker, ‘What fleeing Twitter users will – and won’t – find on Mastodon‘ by Kyle Chayka (22 November 2022)

International Organisations

- May 2023: Commentator on the South Centre (the intergovernmental policy research and analysis institution of developing countries) Roundtable on EU Digital Act and Data Governance.

- September 2022: Speaker on the WTO Public Forum panel with a presentation on 'TRIPS and the ‘publics’ of patent law, organised by Third World Network and People’s Health Movement.

- September 2021: Speaker on the WTO Public Forum panel on the ‘The Future of the TRIPS Agreement Post Covid-19′ organised by the intergovernmental organisation, South Centre, together with Dr. Yuanqiong Hu, MSF Access Campaign, Geneva, Dr. Dean Baker, Center for Economic Policy and Research, Washington DC, and Dr. Carlos M. Correa, Executive Director of the South Centre.

The panel discussion was moderated by Dr. Viviana Muñoz-Tellez, Coordinator of the Health, Intellectual Property and Biodiversity Programme of the South Centre.

My intervention stressed the need for technology transfer as part of TRIPS’ promise.

Research Supervision

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD supervisees. However, please ensure that you have a research proposal which corresponds with the University of Warwick School of Law requirements.

Indication of interest for PhD projects in the following fields are particularly welcome:

intellectual property law which take contextual and crossdisciplinary approaches (e.g. political economy, history, theory);
legal theory, especially relating to media and/or literary theories;
law, science and technology.

Current PhD supervisions:

Rosie Woodhouse: Property, Power and Speculation in State-Capital Accumulation Imperatives Today

Arrin Lewis: Access, pricing and intellectual properties related to CAR-T cell therapies in the UK