Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research

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Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research

BICAR is a non-profit, pedagogical and research para-academy.

The Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) is a non-profit, pedagogical and research para-academy. Founded in 2019, we promote critical thinking, teaching, research methods, reading, and writing in the humanities and social sciences, overlooked or beyond the scope of existing ‘university discourse’. BICAR tunes its curriculum to critical philosophy, visual culture, architectur

e, sound, the performing arts, and design, producing a relationship between intellectual inquiry and social, political, and aesthetic transformation. In light of its location in Bombay and India, we create an environment for collective analysis and response to the contradictions of modernity and contemporaneity under conditions of global capital.

08/04/2026

We’ll study how Alenka Zupančič deploys a Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalytic method to get at the (il)logical kernel of conspiracy theories.

Interpretive Methods | 9 April - 4 May

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07/04/2026

We’ll understand what ‘dialectical’ and ‘historical’ materialism means methodologically and examine Adrian Johnston’s deft application of both to examine capitalism’s ‘infinite greed’.

Interpretive Methods | 9 April - 4 May

06/04/2026

We’ll consider Foucault’s provocative ‘discourse analysis’ of s*xuality and learn how we might apply the interpretive method to other discourses hegemonic in contemporary society.

Interpretive Methods | 9 April - 4 May

Visit the link in bio to register.

04/04/2026

Through Hannah Pitkin’s study of the word ‘justice’ in philosophical and everyday life, we’ll see how ‘ordinary language analysis’ leads not to a celebration of multiple meanings, but to a much more precise, crystallisation of the concept and a judgment on how it must and mustn’t be used going forward.

Interpretive Methods | 9 April - 4 May

Visit the link in our bio to register.

27/03/2026

We’ll begin Interpretive Methods with Roland Barthes’ semiotics, working through his analyses, for instance, of French imperialism and The World of Wrestling. In our next session, we’ll turn to Clifford Geertz’s hermeneutics, a ‘thick description’ of the Balinese cockfight.

Interpretive Methods | 9 April - 4 May

Visit the link in our bio to register.

20/03/2026

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01/02/2026

HISTORICITY | 2 - 26 February 2026

STARTS TOMORROW!

To register, visit the link in our bio.

Paolo Virno’s exceptional thought on language and negation and the ‘historicity of experience’ will serve as a basis — almost like 'textbooks' — for all of the reading and viewing we do throughout the course.

For inquiries, email [email protected]

28/01/2026

HISTORICITY | 2 - 26 February 2026

To register, visit the link in our bio.

We’ll consider Joan Copjec’s ’The Sexual Compact’ within her recent volume on Kiarostami’s cinema of subtraction: she argues that ‘gender studies’ and its decolonial or postmodern extensions historicise, neuter, and abstract s*x as static and pregiven. Copjec’s psychoanalytic, ‘historicity’ of s*xual difference is a forceful challenge. We’ll confront the relation between temporality and s*x Copjec provokes.

For inquiries, email [email protected]

Address

Mumbai

Website

https://www.bicar.org/upcoming-programs

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