Ritwik is 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. He is a communicator and community leader with over fifteen years of experience in communications, circulation management, operations and event management. He has a Bachelor’s Degree (with Honors) in Political Science from India and a Master’s Degree in International Relations from the United Kingdom. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC where he is studying critical theoretical ways to dismantle settler colonialism.

Ritwik began his career in retail and transitioned to a circulation and communications management position working for a major UK-based B2B publishing house, a unique role that he championed from 2008 to 2023. Between 2016 and 2020, in his role as the vice President, he has also led a cultural organization in India to win multiple awards from some of the biggest regional and national media houses. Since 2021 he has also served as the Editor-in-Chief of “Mantle: The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Research”. In 2023 he helped the Centre for Migration Studies at UBC overhaul their communications strategy, processes, and materials as their Communications Assistant. In 2024 he will continue to be the Program Mentor for the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program (ISGP) helping new and current students make the most out of their academic journey at UBC.

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