Paris: Social Sciences—Critical Theory

Applications for the Winter 2026 Paris: Critical Theory study abroad program are now open. The deadline is April 21, 2025.

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Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory 1

Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, 3CT fellow

This class considers the question of capital, historically, comparatively and conceptually. What is capital? How is it related to value? How is it different from money? How does it work to organize social relations? In what forms, and through what institutional structures, does it materialize? How does it reflect in modes and relations of production? How is it governed, and what is its relation to the political?

This course will enter into such questions, in the first instance, through a reading of Karl Marx. It will subsequently traverse a heterodox genealogy of Marxist social thought (with some emphasis on French theorists), in order to understand how a method of analysis developed to come to terms with nineteenth century European industrial capitalism might help us understand contemporary worlds of extraction, logistics and finance in comparative perspective. We will consider how capital is racialized and gendered, how it has expanded and mutated across place and over time, and what it means that we live in a time today when it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

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Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory 2

Jennifer Pitts, Professor of Political Science and in the Committee on Social Thought and the College, 3CT fellow

This course investigates the central place of empires in the shaping of the modern world and understands critical theory as inextricable from its colonial context. We will consider the constitutive linkages between race and empire and their specific materializations in French imperial history. We will pay particular but not exclusive attention to the context of French imperialism and to Paris as a site of theorizing, and critique of, the imperial global order. We will read authors including Montaigne, Diderot, Tocqueville, Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Fanon, Said, and Trouillot, as well as contemporary theorists including Achille Mbembe, David Scott, Françoise Vergès, and Joan Scott.

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Topics in Contemporary Critical Theory 3

Lisa Wedeen, Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College, Director of 3CT

Using theoretical, historical, and multi-sited ethnographic approaches, this course considers questions of revolution, despair, political retrenchment, nostalgia, the politics of waiting, and temporality more generally. We will engage with the work of revolutionaries, artists, and scholars in exile and those who have stayed in their countries of origin, to reflect on themes of generational change and of evolving priorities, and to investigate the multifarious efforts to navigate everyday life when dreams have been dashed and loved ones lost.

Centered on debates in the Middle East, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and Europe, the class sets out to theorize the experience of what happens in the moments between “past and future” (to borrow Arendt’s phrase), where politically engaged actors are forced to confront the formidable challenges to revolutionary action, the sense of defeat, the struggle over narrative, questions of “grievability,” and the hard work of mourning. At the same time, referencing David Scott’s recent work, we ask what revolutionary thinking might look like when encouraging versions of revolutionary temporality (such as the Marxist idea of linear progress) are no longer easily embraced. Is revolutionary thinking even possible without a revolutionary temporality? In this light, we will think with Fanon and Benjamin, among others, about how we are to understand the political efficacy, pleasures, and horrors of violence. And we will treat artists from the Global South as theorists in their own right, interlocutors whose aesthetic and political understandings of these issues are at once conceptual and lived.