Spring 2026 Critical Theory Courses
Core Courses
The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis core course requirements.
Critical Theory 200
A seminar in 19th century philosophy and social theory concerned with key texts undergirding critical theories in the 20th century. This seminar may include Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and/or Weber, and will be organized around the concept of “critique” and “critical theory.”
Critical Theory 205
A seminar on the Frankfurt School in conjunction with other critical trends, e.g., Adorno and Benjamin and aesthetic theory, or social theory from Bloch to Habermas.
Critical Theory 240
A seminar on contemporary critique and critical theory. This course may include critical race theory, postcontinental political theory, norms and values in critical theory, seminars on the tradition of critique and theology, comparative forms of critique, geopolitical conditions of theory-formation, critical theory and Marxism, critique and the problem of political dissent and citizenship, gender and race in relation to critical practices, psychoanalysis, and literary and art theory and criticism.
Core Courses
German 256 / Film & Media 240 / Critical Theory 205
Frankfurt School Critical Theory
Instructor: Nicholas Baer
Wednesdays, 2-5 PM / Dwinelle 226 / Class 27235
What insights might the Frankfurt School offer into our own critical times? This seminar revisits foundational texts of the Frankfurt School in conjunction with recent work that has engaged with critical theory from the perspectives of climate crisis, digital technologies, feminist and queer politics, postcolonialism, the prison-industrial complex, and right-wing extremism. Thinkers include: Adorno, Benhabib, Benjamin, Buck-Morss, Davis, Fraser, Gordon, Habermas, Honneth, Horkheimer, Jaeggi, Marcuse, and Vázquez-Arroyo.
Classics 218 / Rhetoric 240G / Critical Theory 240
Tarrying with the Negative
Instructor: Mario Telò and James I. Porter
Wednesdays, 2-5 PM / Dwinelle 7415 / 34049
The seminar, open to graduate students from all disciplines, will consider the virtues and risks of “tarrying with the negative” (Hegel) as a principle of theoretical, political, and ethical critique. In what way can negation promote productive change without falling into the trap of (re)conciliation? How can the negation of a negation avoid producing a cheerful positivity and erasure? Can thought or action proceed without negation at all? Concepts to be discussed will include refusal, disavowal, protest, negative dialectics, and destituent politics. Readings (in English) will include excerpts from the Cynic protest tradition, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Bataille, Adorno, Agamben, Berlant, Honig, Zupančič, Swarbrick and Tremblay, C. Warren, D. Marriott, Okiji, and Telò.
Rhetoric 240G / Critical Theory 240
Freud and the Death Drive
Instructor: Samiha Khalil
Tuesdays 3-6 PM / Dwinelle 7415 / Class 32023
In this course, we will trace Sigmund Freud’s theorization of the death drive along three lines of inquiry, beginning with the biology of the instinct, moving to its eventual manifestation at the scale of human civilization and ending with Freud's study of Moses and the symbolic internalization of death (i.e., the inherited ancestral experiences) through the religious phenomenon. As per Freud himself, the discovery of the death drive marked “a turn of thought” in relation to the whole of the psychoanalytic apparatus and, particularly with Moses and Monotheism – Freud's return to religion right before his death – as a site where it is possible to locate a point of crossing between the manifestation of death as an inner biological matter affecting the mental life of individuals (i.e., neurosis; compulsion to repeat; sadism, masochism; fixations), in common behavioral attitudes (i.e., the oedipal complex, or the belief in the man Moses) and in the will to inflict death and destruction en masse. More important, the discovery of the death drive comes with a confession to the historical and psycho-pathological limits of identity, its primordial violent origin and prohibitive continuity and, crucially, what Edward Said identifies as its essential component: “its irremediably diasporic, unhoused character.” Together with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, and "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," we will engage some of Freud’s readers such as Louis Althusser, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, Said, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalemi, amongst others, to situate the death drive in relation to Freud's conceptions of myth, the power of memory and forgetting, language and the symbolic order, and ethics. The aim with this set of readings is to examine Freud’s mode of theorization of the destructive forces arising with the formation of groups – what he names Volkscharakters, or the “character-traits” constituting a people and preserving their unity – and to put emphasis on a crucial racial dimension of Freud’s psychoanalytic thinking identitarian formations.
Education 290A / Critical Theory 240
Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy
Instructor: Zeus Leonardo
Mondays 1-3 PM / Berkeley Way West 4244 / Class 32484
Critical Pedagogy arrived on the educational scene in 1970 with the publication of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. There were precursors to Freire, such as George Counts, Harold Rugg, and John Dewey, but Freire’s work marks the beginning of a critical theory-informed education program. In short, we might consider that Freire’s work is when education theory first becomes “critical.” It was made possible by intellectual currents from Sartre’s existentialism, Fanon and Memmi’s anti-colonialism, Fromm’s psychoanalysis, and Lukacs’ Hegelian Marxism, to name a few. As a phrase, “critical pedagogy” became popularized in the 1980s primarily through Giroux’s writings. This new innovation responded to international developments involving the role that education plays in the institutionalization of power relations but also as a way to ameliorate their effects. Several decades have since passed and Critical Pedagogy develops from its foundations in Freirean pedagogy rooted in Brazil to include Giroux’s cultural studies, McLaren’s global anti-capitalism, Apple’s neo-Gramscian sociology, Lather’s feminist poststructuralism, Leonardo’s critical social theory of race, bell hooks’ practice of freedom, Villenas’ decolonial Chicana feminism, and Biesta’s postmodern theory of the political subject. This course is a survey of the different iterations of Critical Pedagogy to pose the possibilities of what Giroux calls an education made political and the political made educational.
Electives
Comparative Literature 221 / Critical Theory 290
Aesthetics as Critique: Imperfect Media
Rhetoric 240G / Critical Theory 290
Narratives in Science and Mathematics
Instructor: Nasser Zakariya
Wednesdays 9-12 PM / Dwinelle 7415 / Class 32022
Taking up scholarship in disciplines such as the history of mathematics and science, science studies, literary theory and narratology, this course will explore the role of narrative in both the representations and practices of science and mathematics.
Education 280B / Critical Theory 290
Socio-cultural Critique of Education: Or, Introduction to Educational Criticism, Part II
Instructor: Zeus Leonardo
Tuesday 10-1PM / Berkeley Way West 4244 / Class 30209
This course is designed to introduce students to a social and cultural critique of education and society. As a survey course, 280B examines the main theoretical frameworks in social and cultural analysis, learned mainly in EDU 280A, as they pertain to our understanding of the field of education. From materialist perspectives, e.g., Marxist, to discursive perspectives, e.g., Foucauldian, we engage empirical studies in education guided by social and cultural theories applied to issues and concerns found in the works of Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, Paul Willis, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Henry Giroux, and other influential thinkers. In this study, the nature of power will be examined and the way that social groups position themselves in such relations as well as how both empirical and theoretical scholarship defines its nature, function, or deployment. Finally, the elements of “critique” will be central to our understanding of education as a broader practice tied to the state, economy, social relations, and daily life not reducible to schooling.
German 256 / Critical Theory 290
Critical AI Studies
Instructor: Hannes Bajohr
Tuesday 3-6 PM / Dwinelle 282 / Class 32874
Artificial intelligence is not only a technical project but also a political, economic, and cultural one. This graduate seminar introduces the rapidly developing field of Critical AI Studies, which investigates how AI is shaped by – and in turn shapes – structures of political economy, ecological exploitation, racial capitalism, and colonial legacies. We will survey a range of critical perspectives, from historical critiques of cybernetics and automation to contemporary debates about data extraction, labor, bias, and global infrastructures of computation. Readings will draw from media studies, political theory, philosophy, critical race and postcolonial studies, and environmental humanities. We will also ask what Critical AI is itself critical about, reflecting on the boundaries and assumptions of the field as it takes shape. Throughout, we will examine what it means to study AI as an ideological formation as much as a technical artifact, and how humanities-based approaches can contribute to debates about its risks, promises, and futures. Students will be expected to engage both analytically and reflectively, producing research projects that connect theoretical critique with contemporary case studies. Taught in English.
Philosophy 290 / Critical Theory 290*
Graduate Seminar: The World
Instructor: Alva Noe
Tuesday 12-2 / Philosophy 234 / Class 18029
This is a graduate philosophy seminar on the world. For the philosophers for whom the concept of the world figures prominently, “the world” is not another name for the earth, or the physical universe, or even for reality. What is the world, then, and why has its concept proved to be so indispensable to philosophical reflection?
Our focus in this class will be on the writing of Merleau-Ponty and Jonathan Lear, but we will also read Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Murdoch, among others.
Among the questions we will ask are: Do people share a world? Can they? Is the world something we can change? Can one lose the world (or one’s world)? Is there a link between the very idea of the world and mysticism (or religious standpoints or insights)? What does the world have to do with the mind, with consciousness, with experience, and with what is sometimes called the given? How does the world bear on the problem of freedom?
*Please note this class is a 3-unit course. Contact pattydunlap@berkeley.edu prior to the start of the semester.
Although this is a class for graduate students of philosophy, where appropriate the instructor will welcome students and researchers with different backgrounds.