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.
Each year, 20-25 UC graduate students will participate in a fully funded 5-day summer school held at a UC Natural Reserve venue. Oriented by a pressing theme, the week features multiple tracks scheduled to allow attendance at each by all participants, for a week of intensive and collective study (as well as communal food prep and camp care). The initial design offers one weeklong seminar in Marxist pedagogy led by MIR faculty and a seminar on the annual theme with guest faculty The week ends with the Mike Davis Lecture.
The seminar, and individual students, are supported by UCHRI, the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley, Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside, UCI Humanities Center, the Labor Center at UCSD, the Labor Center at UCI, and The Global Latinidades Project an UCSB.
2025 summer seminar applications now open
The 2025 Marxist Institute for Research (MIR) Summer Seminar will run August 7th-12th at Sagehen Creek Field Station near Truckee, CA. This year, we expect to admit approximately 20 students. Participants will be expected to attend all 5+ days of the seminar, arriving at Sagehen or at the Reno airport by late-afternoon on the 7th and departing mid-day on the 12th. Accepted students will receive full funding which will cover tuition, housing, food, and reimbursements for travel within California, including tickets or mileage for car travel (we strongly encourage car pooling and will help facilitate the 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 faculty classes in Marxist pedagogy oriented by discussing Capital Vol. 1 and drawn from the core faculty of Charmaine Chua, Chris Chen, Joshua Clover, Colleen Lye, Wendy Matsumura, Annie McClanahan, and Rob Nichols. Our guest faculty seminar will be “Climate Marxism” with Thea Riofrancos (Providence College) and Alyssa Battistoni (Barnard College); further description and readings to come. In keeping with this theme, the annual Mike Davis Lecture will be delivered by Andreas Malm (Lund University). All UC graduate students are welcome to apply. Other members of the UC community may apply on a case-by-case basis — please reach out to us at marxistinstituteforresearch@gmail.com with any questions about the process (please do so before reaching out to specific faculty members).
Application here. Deadline is FRIDAY, JANUARY 17th, 2025. Late applications will not be accepted.
2025 MIR Summer Seminar Guest Faculty Bios:
Alyssa Battistoni teaches political theory at Barnard College. She is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019), and Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, forthcoming in 2025 with Princeton University Press.
Andreas Malm is an Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University. His latest books are The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth and, with Wim Carton, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, both from Verso.
Thea Riofrancos is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019); her next book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, is forthcoming with W.W. Norton.
2024 summer seminar…was amazing
The 2024 Marxist Institute for Research (MIR) Summer Seminar ran from August 23-27 at Sagehen Creek Field Station near Truckee, CA. Students and core faculty talked about the form of value; the mystery of where absolute surplus value comes from; productivity, relative surplus value, and labor organizing; racialization and surplus population; and more! The guest seminar with Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano pursued a far-ranging inquiry into original or so-called primitive accumulation, and its possible persistence in the present. Our Mike Davis Lecture from William Clare Roberts, with response from Søren Mau, took up theories of power and domination beyond ideology. Our 5-team trivia night rocked even if the charismatic underdog team did not quite pull off a world-historical upset against a team stocked with faculty. In general many amazing things happened. There was swimming.
2023 seminar:
Our inaugural seminar ran August 9-13 at Sagehen Creek Field Station near Truckee, CA. It was enlivening and thrilling and there was a lake and a trivia contest and lots of study, all of it in an open-air classroom. It featured a faculty seminar in Marxist pedagogy oriented by “Capital Concerns” — challenges in teaching Marx’s central work in the present — and led by Chris Chen, Charmaine Chua, Joshua Clover, Colleen Lye, and Annie McClanahan. We also offered a guest faculty seminar considering the usefulness of bourgeois economic science to Marxist study with Geoff Mann (professor of geography at Simon Fraser University and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking) and Kirstin Munro (Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School). Robin Kelly delivered the inaugural Mike Davis Lecture and it was beautiful and piercing. The week looked like this:
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