New: Doctoral Certificate in Critical Social Theory
Launching in Fall 2026, 3CT’s certificate in Critical Social Theory offers doctoral students the opportunity to develop a deep understanding of how institutions, ideas, and affects shape the world around us in ways that are often hidden, but also networked and powerful. With an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the program seeks to foster a lively intellectual community of students who share a commitment to discovering and defining new ways to explore pressing issues in contemporary life.
To register your interest in pursuing the Critical Social Theory certificate, please complete the form linked below. Questions can be directed to Anna Searle Jones, 3CT’s associate director.
Eligibility
- Open to PhD students in the Social Sciences Division, the Arts and Humanities Division, or the Divinity School
- PhD students in other schools to be considered by petition
Requirements
- Four CCCT cross-listed courses: view current and upcoming courses here
- Two must be taught by an instructor outside of student’s home department (exceptions by petition)
- Non-CCCT courses may be accepted by petition
- Active participation in Critical Social Theory Working Group, with attendance of a minimum of six sessions within one academic year
- Presentation to 3CT fellows at annual student symposium
- A dissertation or other major research paper that reflects the intellectual mission of 3CT
About Critical Social Theory
Critical social theory makes a concerted point of moving beyond surface appearances to discern structures internal to politics, economy, and communication, in the interest of rendering them less conducive to forms of oppression across the lines of race, class, gender, and/or geopolitics. The working assumption of critical social theory is that these pervasive forms of violence are loaded into the everyday, built into infrastructures of production and consumption, language, governance and media, institutions, and identarian categories. Critical social theorists examine how powerful forms of embedded violence become naturalized and occluded—and thereby rendered acceptable. This orientation towards theory takes a political interest in revealing and understanding how social institutions and structures turn into forces that shape people’s prospects from behind the scenes, through effects that are often hidden (or sometimes hidden in plain sight), but also intense, networked, and powerful.
Critical social theory, like other varieties of academic theory, is about advancing propositions, and identifying and marshalling evidence. From its long tradition of analytical rigor and intellectual intensity, reaching back to the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, however, critical social theory draws on a wide range of analytic approaches (Marxist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, new historicist, deconstructionist, feminist, critical race theoretical, and affect theoretical) that fruitfully explore differences between surfaces and depths to unpack the lived experience and political ramifications of social practices, texts, and mass-mediated forms.