Welcome Back!
On behalf of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI), I extend a warm welcome back into the semester. CICI is home to the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR), the Program in Critical Theory, the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP), the journal Critical Times, the Summer Minor in Digital Humanities, and most recently, the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative. We are excited to usher in a new academic year during which we amplify points of connection between our programs, within the Arts and Humanities, and across divisions.
CICI brings together research on a wide array of pressing, contemporary issues: borders and migration; religion and democracy; the global forms of critical theory; authoritarianisms old and new; climate crisis; regimes of intolerance, discrimination, and racialized violence; postcolonial studies; and the role of psychedelics in the arts and humanities. The rise of authoritarianism across the world is a vital concern across our various programs, as the past year’s programming attests. In 2023-2024, with the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CICI and ICCTP organized “Imagining Beyond Authoritarianism: Race and Gender in our Times,” a series of gatherings across the United States with artists, scholars, and activists who sought to analyze authoritarian phantasms and to envision a counter-imaginary that affirms radical democratic potentials. A public event brought together Angela Davis, Sir Isaac Julien, Claudia Rankine, Boots Riley, and others to experience and discuss how poetry, the visual arts, activism, theory, and popular culture create visions of just and livable futures. Last Fall, a symposium on the “great replacement” theory explored the origins and global circulations of a conspiracy theory that warns of population replacement by racialized foreigners, while Critical Theory’s scholar in residence, Nivedita Menon, examined Hindu nationalism and its relationship to secularism in India and the Global South. In Spring, the panel discussion “Fascism: An Eternal Recurrence?” investigated Western authoritarianism through the prism of Putin’s Russia, and the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) annual conference brought together over a hundred scholars of religion to discuss solidarity and alliance building in precarious times.
This year, CICI will continue to be a source of critical reflection on questions of authoritarianism, racism, and intolerance. BCSR’s Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance could not be more timely given the upcoming US elections (October 1). The lecture, “Project 2025, Christian Nationalism, and November Elections,” will be delivered by Bradley Onishi, the host of a popular podcast and a leading scholar on white Christian nationalism. Critical Theory’s new and tremendously successful Back/Africana series, with the support of numerous co-sponsors, will bring Michaeline Crichlow from Duke University in Fall (October 15), and Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe from the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, as well as Fred Moten from New York University in Spring.
The first events of the year also include a two-day conference on Jean-Luc Nancy co-presented with the Department of Rhetoric (September 13-14). Shortly thereafter, Lynne Huffer will deliver a lecture on “Inhuman Time: Foucault, Wynter, Extinction” co-presented by Rhetoric, CICI, and French (September 17).
CICI is also home to several fellowships and working groups, such as our newly launched collaborative initiative “Psychedelics in Society and Culture” with the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center, funded by Flourish Trust. The initiative’s fellowship program explores the connections between psychedelics and humanistic inquiry across histories, cultures, and geographies. The inaugural cohort of Flourish Fellows and Scholars is currently working on interdisciplinary projects including Poulomi Saha’s initiative to probe the emancipatory potential of critical theory through the lens of psychedelic experiences.
This year we have also awarded eight CICI Summer Research Grants to graduate and undergraduate students engaged in interdivisional and interdisciplinary research on urgent contemporary topics, from the militarization of Tribal lands in the United States to the link between fascism and the historical avant-garde art in Europe. All are welcome to attend their presentations on September 11. CICI has relaunched Berkeley’s exchange program with Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and we look forward to cultivating opportunities for collaborative research through academic exchange of faculty, graduate students, and postdocs, conferences, and workshops.
I’m particularly delighted to announce that Shannon Jackson is the new director of the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative. She will organize the initiative around themes such as arts and humanities engagements in climate science, engineering, and policy; ecology across various disciplines; and the importance of the environment in relation to social justice issues.
Finally, I am thrilled to welcome Breana George into the position of CICI manager. Breana brings her immense experience as Project Manager for Mellon grants to our unit; her knowledge of Berkeley and CICI are invaluable in her new role.
I look forward to connecting with you this semester and sharing more news about colloquia, publications, scholarly collaborations, and the synergies that emerge when we go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Warm regards.
Debarati Sanyal
Director, CICI
Professor, French
