News & Announcements

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

Dear CICI community,

We are delighted to announce our inaugural symposium: Borders and Crossings: Contemporary Arts and Techniques of Migration. The event will take place March 10-11, 2023, at the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley.

The Designated Emphasis in the Study of Religion (DESR) is pleased to announce our spring 2023 courses that count towards the core and elective requirements for the DE. These courses reflect the interdisciplinary breadth of the DESR, with core and elective options in South & Southeast Asian Studies, Comparative Literature/German, History, Public Health, Buddhist Studies, Jewish Studies, Anthropology, and Social Welfare.

The Program in Critical Theory will support four Designated Emphasis students’ dissertation projects in 2022–2023. Kevin Stone and Saniya Taher will receive semester-long Critical Theory Dissertation Fellowships, while Phillip Campanile will receive a Critical Theory Completion Grant and Laila Riazi will receive a Critical Theory Research Grant.

The Division of Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce the appointment of Debarati Sanyal(link is external) as director of the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research(link is external) (CIR) effective July 1, 2022.

The International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs is pleased to announce the publication of the first issue of volume five of Critical Times, published by Duke University Press at https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times

Jaeyoon Park is a PhD candidate in Political Science with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. His dissertation charts the transformation of scholarly and popular discourse on addiction in the United States over the past half-century. Working with texts ranging from scientific articles and diagnostic manuals to 12-step handbooks, it explores how addiction has been reimagined as a normal feature of human experience in our time. In Fall 2022, Jaeyoon joined the political science faculty at Amherst College.

This interview was conducted in Fall 2021.