This newly established NSSR-wide graduate seminar in Critical Social Inquiry is a Dean’s Initiative directed by Ann Laura Stoler and led each week with TNS faculty from across a wide range of traditions, fields of engagement, and research practices. In each session, faculty and students will grapple with differing perspectives on what constitutes the key elements of critical social inquiry –with what it does, what practices it animates, and what varied methods of inquiry it is seen to require. Rather than assume a shared notion of critical social inquiry, we start from the premise that the very terms “critique,” “social,” and “inquiry” each have political, ethical and conceptual dimensions of their own. We see this, for example, in how feminisms differently inflect our work in philosophy and psyschology, in how fascisms viewed from their discrepant locales and genealogies can redefine what we think they look like now. What is viewed as democratic practice looks wildly different depending on the alternate conceptual methodologies we bring to bear on them. Conceptual and methodological practices–so too political ones– are here considered mutually dependent. A key orienting question, asked by the eminent, late NSSR Professor of Philosophy Richard Bernstein, is “What are the demands that particular concepts put upon us?” A further query follows: “Are our respective guiding research questions worth having answers to?” Focus is on how our conceptual lexicons and affective grammars can better speak to the urgencies of our times, and our widely disparate living of them. Drawing on the extraordinary range of research being carried out by students and faculty, we take this as an occasion to put that analytical, conceptual and political work into sustained conversation, unfettered by disciplinary borders.What critical resources do we have to engage with the rise of autocracy, climate catastrophe, a culture of war, growing femicide, and the spread of uninterrupted crimes against humanity?