Ritwik Bhattacharjee

B.A. (Hons.) in Political Science, Jadavpur University, India, 2006
M.A. in International Relations, Middlesex University, United Kingdom, 2007

I am an uninvited guest living, studying, and working on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples—the Musqueam, the Squamish, and the Tseil-Waututh Nations. I am a communicator and community leader with over fifteen years of experience in communications, circulation management, operations, and event management.

I am currently employed full-time as a Communications Specialist at the School of Journalism and the Faculty of Arts at UBC.

Since 2021 I have served as the Editor-in-Chief of “Mantle: The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Research” and the Program Mentor at ISGP.

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.

political theory; political philosophy; critical social theory; decolonization; Indigenous studies;

Problematizing Settler Grievances: Danielle Smith and Contested Colonialism