UC Berkeley’s African American Studies Department has launched a three-year initiative on Black critical theory to advance contemporary academic inquiry in Black studies.
The Black Critical Theory Initiative, which began in fall 2025, aims to explore new directions in the field of Black studies by focusing on its contemporary practitioners’ engagements with critical theory. The initiative’s founder and convener, African American Studies Professor Henry Washington, Jr., said the initiative aims to “bring greater attention to some of the more contemporary issues in Black studies,” particularly the relationship between anti-Blackness and dominant models of being and knowing in the West.
Washington noted that Black critical theory has become a defining area of Black studies in the past decade as scholars attempt to understand why "formal declarations of freedom and inclusion have not seemed to adequately resolve" the persistence of Black suffering.
The initiative will feature a unique theme each academic year, based on feedback from graduate student surveys. Each semester will include a public lecture by a leading junior scholar, along with graduate student workshops and a reading group.
According to Washington, the 2025–26 theme, “Blackness and Relation,” explores “how antiblack violence surfaces the fictions of universality that suffuse contemporary understandings of what it means to be human.” Wesleyan University English Professor Tyrone S. Palmer, an expert on Black critical theory and affect, will deliver the fall public lecture on Oct. 7.
Palmer’s work explores “the failures of Black suffering to generate affective responses in the minds and hearts of the general public," Washington said.
He added: “There’s this impulse to pathologize Black people as deserving of their structural conditions, and that for him [Palmer] is in part a problem of a broader incapacity to register the being and the feeling of Blackness.”
During the spring 2026 semester, Emory University Philosophy Professor Axelle Karera will deliver the lecture, discussing her research at the intersection of Black critical theory and the environmental humanities.
Her work argues that the traditional view of climate change as a “universal” problem that should unite all people across difference doesn’t properly account for the racist, colonial origins of the climate crisis, nor for the way environmental disasters disproportionately harm specific racial groups due to systemic discrimination, Washington said.
Looking ahead, Washington said his hope for the project is that it provides “an opportunity for the campus community to gain greater exposure to Black critical theory’s intellectual project.”
On the graduate student level, he hopes the project provides “not just exposure, but face time with the speakers who are producing the work in real time,” which “will enrich students’ capacities to mobilize these analytics in their own research.”
The next two themes are still being developed, with student discussions pointing toward potential topics such as Black aesthetics, Black Marxism and the intersection of critical theory and Black feminism.
Learn more about the Black Critical Theory Initiative here