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.
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:
We are excited already for next year’s summer seminars with around 20 new students; please check our accounts on twitter (@MarxNetwork) or bluesky (ucmarxistinstitute.bsky.social) or join our email list (marxistinstituteforresearch@gmail.com) to get notifications and the call for applications.