UC Berkeley Awarded $2.6 Million Grant for “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times”

Berkeley, CA — UC Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP) have been awarded $2.6 million to support a groundbreaking multi-year initiative titled “A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times.” Through collaborative workshops, conferences, performances, publications, and a dynamic, open-ended digital platform, this project brings together academics, artists, activists, and other community members to develop concrete strategies, tools, and proposals to create a counter-imaginary to authoritarianism. The collaborative project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will be undertaken in collaboration with Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative (EAHI), and New York University’s Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study Co-Lab (CRACS Co-Lab). The project is led by scholars Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School; Shannon Jackson, Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor; Debarati Sanyal, Zaffaroni Family Chair; and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities, New York University.