Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought

Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought It is an interstitial space rather than an institution.

The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought (ICCT) is an independent forum for intellectual and artistic study and experimentation, devoted to the speculative and critical exploration of potentials in the fissures of the planetary present. ICCT is born of the attempt to cultivate a mode of working together that is grounded in criticality and mutuality: simultaneously questioning the assumptio

ns that underpin our knowledges and forms of thought, and elaborating a shared desire to enable ideas (in all their forms and orientations) to pass between us, to enable us to be present to one another otherwise. At the heart of ICCT’s work, in other words, lies a commitment to the idea that thought is lived as a practice of sociality whose job is not capturing the world but unsettling it— making visible the cracks in the edifice of the present and assembling the tools to navigate them by other means, in radically different directions.
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Emerging amidst the hollowing out of critical institutions and the deserted landscapes of the imagination, ICCT is a space for thinking in common, for elaborating thought as a shared praxis of collective unsettling. It operates less as a fixed entity than as an ongoing ensemble, an evolving field of relations shaped by the encounters it generates. Through online and in-person gatherings, published texts, visual works, and an array of other activities and modes of expression in constant transformation, ICCT provides an infrastructure for instituting thinking as a critical practice of collective inquiry.
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What guides our activities is the possibility of elaborating contemporary critical thought not as a quest for mastery or a search for the right theory but as a shared practice of listening, of lingering with difficulty, of refusing the temptations of the easy answer and the stifling protocols of the disciplinary, of moving with the thought-provoking lures and discomforts of what evades totality and resists finality. We nurture the inchoate, the unfinished, the imaginative and the speculative in order to explore questions and movements that probe the boundaries of what appears to be settled, holding spaces where dissonances can flourish without having to devolve into consensus or cohesion, where the questions around which we gather can be shared and reverberate without being pressed into resolution or quashed in the demand for immediate utility.
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At the ICCT, ideas are not products to be consumed but invitations to engage, to assemble, to experiment, to expand our collective imaginations and transform our modes of sociality— to think, live, and act otherwise in a world that demands the otherwise.

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07/04/2026

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Our book forum on Claire Blencowe's "Spirits of Extraction" continues over at contemporarycriticalthought.orgCheck it ou...
05/03/2026

Our book forum on Claire Blencowe's "Spirits of Extraction" continues over at contemporarycriticalthought.org

Check it out!

Check out our new book forum discussing Claire Blencowe's "Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and ...
27/02/2026

Check out our new book forum discussing Claire Blencowe's "Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race" (Manchester University Press 2025)

The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought is pleased to invite you to join us for a serial experiment with and aro...
16/02/2026

The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought is pleased to invite you to join us for a serial experiment with and around our theme of Herd.

From March 2026, we will be gathering to collectively think with the figure of the Herd. Led by an eclectic range of thinkers, and provoked by selected readings, each session in this series will experiment with the concept’s many permutations, to rethink Herd as /Species, as /The Masses, as /Population, as /Kin, and more. Join us, as we spin out in many directions, thinking with the figure of the herd to grapple with not only transformative global changes affecting health, but also, and more broadly, to experiment with new ways of thinking amidst the here-and-now of our present planetary condition.

To begin, on 3 March, Mariam Motamedi Fraser leads a discussion of Herd/Species. Mariam has chosen two of her own pieces for this session (please read the texts in this order):

1. Dog Politics (2024) chapter seven, pages 219-233

2. Extract from ‘Carbon stories: animals and the science and politics of zoogeochemistry’ (an article that is currently under review)

Both pieces explore the problems that follow when categories meet living animals (with Haraway’s When Species Meet in mind here), and the challenges of trying to think animals without them. Chapter seven: when species meets dogs, with a very brief reflection on population, herd, shoal, flock, tank, exultation and ostentation. ‘Carbon stories:’ when trophic/functional categories (e.g. herbivore, carnivore) meet any living animal, and the meeting is mediated by maths, rather than biology. One important category that is not discussed at length in either piece is race. Foran extended discussion of race and species, please see Motamedi Fraser, M. (2025) ‘The politics of animal time: species, race, and the Anthropocene,’ in Environment and Planning E 8(4): 1389-1407.

If anyone wants the full-length draft of ‘Carbon stories,’ please contact Mariam directly on [email protected]. Note that the extract from 'Carbon stories,' chosen for the Herd/Species session, offers a simpler representation of zoogeochemistry than the paper as a whole.

Please join us as the Herd gathers, and make sure to sign up to our mailing list to receive the invitation to subsequent meetings.

The Herd series is shepherded by Kari Lancaster, Marsha Rosengarten, and Nele Jensen.

22/01/2026
The next installment of A Thousand WetLands: Southern Thinking against the Gods of Coloniality is here 💦 ��Read it on ou...
20/11/2025

The next installment of A Thousand WetLands: Southern Thinking against the Gods of Coloniality is here 💦 ��

Read it on our website, and sign up for the reading group. ��

We will meet online on Dec 5 with Tanzil Shafique, members of the ICCT Collective, and others to discuss and elaborate joint explorations of the questions it raises.

www.contemporarycriticalthought.org

🔥🔥🔥The first instalment of Tanzil Shafique's transformative "A Thousand Wetlands", is now published in Interrogations, t...
20/10/2025

🔥🔥🔥The first instalment of Tanzil Shafique's transformative "A Thousand Wetlands", is now published in Interrogations, the journal of the Institute of Contemporary Critical Thought.
It's riveting. Check it out here, and join us for our first online reading group session on 4th Nov 3pm (GMT):

https://www.contemporarycriticalthought.org/post/a-thousand-wetlands-rivulet-1

10/10/2025
🔥🔥We're delighted to welcome you to the brand new INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THOUGHTPlease join us: https://www...
10/10/2025

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We're delighted to welcome you to the brand new INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THOUGHT

Please join us: https://www.contemporarycriticalthought.org/
And sign up to our mailing list to keep up to date with all our upcoming events and publications!

22/07/2024

The most exciting editorial project to take shape in a very very long time. You'll want to stay in the loop. Click "Like" 👇

Les Temps qui restent (TQR), issu de l’ancien comité de rédaction des Temps Modernes, est un collectif autour d’une r***e en ligne. Les TQR explorent la notion sartrienne de l'engagement et l'héritage de la Modernité à l'ère de l'Anthropocène.

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http://www.contemporarycriticalthought.org/

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