Marxist Institute for Research Summer Seminar

Applications now open until Feb 13

The theme of the MIR 2023 summer seminar is “Marxism in Transition”—addressing the present’s desperate volatility as object of study and context for rising global interest in adequate approaches to capitalism and its crisis character, while registering the scholarly and pedagogical need for Marxist thought to engage anticolonial thought, Black studies, gender studies, and other vital currents of contemporary theory. Through transdisciplinary methodologies, theoretical breadth, and the gathered force of thinkers from across the system and beyond, MIR hopes to address this interest and support the kinds of research that can develop our understandings of the present in an era of extraordinary need. 

The faculty seminar in Marxist pedagogy will be oriented by “Capital Concerns”—challenges in teaching Marx’s central work in the present—and led by Chris Chen, Charmaine Chua, Joshua Clover, Colleen Lye, and Annie McClanahan. 

The guest seminar in Economics for Marxists, considering the use of bourgeois economic science for historical materialist inquiry, will be taught by Geoff Mann (In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution) and Kirstin Munro (The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households: Compromise, Conflict and Complicity).

The inaugural Mike Davis Lecture will be delivered by Glen Sean Coulthard (Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition).

MRI invites applications from all University of California graduate students (who will have priority), and is also open to applications from undergraduates and employees. Learn more on the MIR website and the Summer Seminar page, or jump right to the application form. You can email the institute at marxistinstituteforresearch@gmail.com.