Ritwik Bhattacharjee is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His research areas include political theory, political philosophy, critical social theory, and critical Indigenous thought. His interdisciplinary project analyzes settler-colonial unconscious attachments to land. For 2023-’24 he is the continuing Editor-in-Chief for Mantle: The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Research.

My research centers on theories of the background and their unconscious effects on social behavior.

I am especially interested in studying the specific psychopathologies that power the ugly practices of the settler colonial lifeworld in Canada, viz., a. the pathological reification of colonial land as a transitional object in the Winnicottian sense; and, b. the concomitant sexualization of land as mother that constitutes the parricidal complex carried out by the hegemonic domination and genocidal erasure of Indigenous peoples who take up the signification of the ‘savage’ primal Father in the settler unconscious.

As a project rooted in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, it speaks to radical and decolonized democratic practices of social integration that transgress the traditional metatheoretical debates around agonism and deliberation.

Collie, J., & Bhattacharjee, R. (2023). Problematizing Settler Grievances: Danielle Smith and Contested Colonialism. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne De Science Politique, 1-7. doi:10.1017/S000842392300001X

Fellowships

Four Year Fellowship (4YF) Award, University of British Columbia, 2020-2024

South Asia Regional Academic Scholarship, Middlesex University, 2006-2007

Awards

Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, Killam Trust, 2022-2023

Faculty of Graduate Studies Graduate Award, University of British Columbia, 2022

International Tuition Award, University of British Columbia, 2020-2022

President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award, University of British Columbia, 2020 – 2023