​​A major objective of the Marxist Institute for Research is an annual Summer Seminar for UC graduate students, led by faculty from the UC system and beyond.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: “Marxist Internationalisms” 2026 summer seminar

The 2026 Materialist Institute for Research (MIR) Summer Seminar will run August 6-11 at Sagehen Creek Field Station near Truckee, CA. Participants will be expected to attend all 6 days of the seminar, arriving at Sagehen or at the Reno airport by mid-afternoon on the 6th and departing mid-day on the 11th. Accepted students will receive full funding that covers tuition, housing, food, and travel reimbursements within California, including tickets or mileage for car travel (we strongly encourage carpooling and will help facilitate logistics). Housing will be shared bunk-house style; we’ll cook collectively, and all meals will be vegetarian and vegan-friendly. There is very limited wi-fi and cell service. The Summer Seminar will feature a faculty seminar on Marxist pedagogy, focused on Capital Vol. 1 and led by the core MIR faculty: Yousuf al-Bulushi, Charmaine Chua, Kelly Kay, Wendy Matsumura, Annie McClanahan, and Rob Nichols. Our guest faculty seminar will be “Marxist Internationalisms” with Martin Arboleda (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile) and Rebecca Karl (New York University). The annual Mike Davis Lecture will be delivered by Harsha Walia (author and organizer). 

Applications are due January 16, 2026. Late applications cannot be accepted.

Apply here: https://forms.gle/t2HxfEt1yMMMtPhG6

Guest Faculty Seminar: “Marxist Internationalisms” with Martín Arboleda and Rebecca Karl 

Rebecca Karl teaches modern Chinese history at New York University in New York. Her published work to date includes books and articles on Chinese intellectual history, political economy, revolutions, Marxism, socialism, and early Chinese feminism. She is co-founder of Critical China Scholars, co-editor of positionspolitics.org, editorial collective member of positions and Notebooks, past President of AAUP-NYU, and among the founding members of NYU’s FSJP chapter. Rebecca’s seminar will focus on Marxist internationalisms from the perspective of China’s revolutionary 20th century in the context of the global 20th century of political radicalisms, class struggle, counter-revolutions, and war.

Martín Arboleda is Associate Professor of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. His research explores the political economy of globalized extraction, as well as the political and intellectual history of Latin American theories of development and underdevelopment. His fields of interest include global political economy, critical social theory, and development studies. Martín’s seminar will discuss the political economy of internationalism, especially by addressing the existing relation between struggles for natural resource sovereignty and active non-alignment in Third World economies during the twentieth century and by outlining a theory of ecological development in the planetary era.

Mike Davis Keynote Lecture, Title TBA

Harsha Walia (she/her) is the award-winning author of Border and Rule (2021) and Undoing Border Imperialism (2014), and the co-author of many community-engaged reports such as Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration, Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women in Vancouver Downtown Eastside, and Colour of Violence: Race, Gender & Anti-Violence Services. She has worked in frontline and leadership roles in the anti-violence and gender equity sector for twenty years, currently serving as the Racial Equity Lead at the Centre for Family Equity. She has also been an active organizer in feminist, anti-racist, migrant justice, abolitionist, and anti-colonial movements for the past two decades, including with grassroots collectives such as No One Is Illegal, Olympics Resistance Network, Anti-Capitalist Convergence, Boycott Israeli Apartheid Campaign, and currently Weaving the Worlds collective.