News & Announcements

Welcome Back!

The Department of Rhetoric and The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry present a two-day conference, "Jean-Luc Nancy: Antiquity and Beyond." The program will take place September 13 and 14, 2024. 

Judith Butler appeared on City Arts and Lectures on June 13 in conversation with Poulomi Saha. 

The UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) have announced the first cohort of the Psychedelics in Society and Culture program—an initiative aimed at expanding psychedelic research and dialogue across the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry is thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2024 CICI Summer Research Grants. Join us in congratulating these students as they embark on their research projects.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry is pleased to relaunch the exchange program between University of California, Berkeley and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. This joint program supports innovative international collaborations between UC Berkeley and LMU in the Arts and Humanities. We facilitate academic exchange of faculty members, graduate students, and postdocs through visiting professorships, conferences, and workshops.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry is pleased to announce that select recordings of its annual symposium, Demos Anxiety: "Great Replacement" Theory and Democracy, are now available. To view all recordings of the symposium, find the curated playlist.

On Thursday, February 1, 2024, the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Program in Critical Theory co-presented Fascism: An Eternal Recurrence?, a panel conversation centered on the question: "What is fascism today?". Panelists included Dylan Riley (Sociology, UC Berkeley), Alexei Yurchak (Anthropology, UC Berkeley), Blanca Missé (French, SFSU), and Ilya Budraitskis (Critical Theory, UCB), with moderation by Aglaya Glebova, (European Modern Art, UC Berkeley).

Debarati Sanyal, faculty director at the UC Berkeley Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, UC Berkeley, and Imran Khan, executive director of the Science of Psychedelics, also at UC Berkeley, speak with Forbes contributor Andrew DeAngelo about "Psychedelics in Society and Culture," a collaborative effort between the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University to, as Khan puts it, "delve into new areas of essential psychedelic inquiry."

On November 15, the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University announced a new, collaborative initiative that will expand psychedelic research across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), in collaboration with the Division of Arts and Humanities, invites you to discover a sample of the innovative, cross-disciplinary graduate and undergraduate research projects supported by our first Summer Research Grant. 

Russian social science professors Ilya Matveev and Ilya Budraitskis, renowned for their expertise on authoritarianism, fled their country after Russia invaded Ukraine. A faculty and staff coalition helped give them a safe harbor at UC Berkeley.

Read more here about the tireless work and collaboration that went into welcoming Budraitskis and Matveev to the Program in Critical Theory as faculty members.

Tuesday, October 17 | 5 PM - 7 PM
Geballe Room, Townsend Center, UC Berkeley

Dear CICI community,


We are delighted to announce our annual symposium, Demos Anxiety: “Great Replacement” Theory and Democracy. The event will take place on October 20, 2023, in the Maude Fife Room at UC Berkeley.

Friday, October 6, 2023 | 10 am – 5 pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall

The study of elements (air, water, and land) is at the center of intersecting discourses (posthuman and anticolonial) in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Climate change and the COVID pandemic have made it urgent to address the ways in which these elements might inform our analyses of bio- and necropolitics, while helping us imagine alternative relationalities.

Please join us for a talk by Laura Zander, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre “Law and Literature” at the University of Muenster. The talk will be moderated by Dr. Devin Zuber (Associate Professor, Graduate Theological Union), with a response from Dr. Munir Jiwa (Associate Professor, and Director of the Center for Islamic Studies, Graduate Theological Union).

Wednesday April 12, 2023, 5 - 6:30 pm

Please join us for Forms of Psychedelic Life: An Interdisciplinary Conference Exploring the Intersections of Aesthetics, Ethics, Religion, and Altered States

April 12-15, 2023

UC Berkeley

Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary

Please join us for a talk by Baptiste Morizot, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille.

Friday March 3, 2023, 1 pm

3335 Dwinelle Hall

Who Makes the Earth Habitable? From a Metaphysics of Production to a Metaphysics of Alliance