The Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT) is a non-profit research and educational association based in Paris, France. Our goal is to take learning, scholarship, and discussion about the Arts and Humanities out of the academic milieu and open it up to the general public.
PICT has been active since 2018 and organizes a variety of courses, workshops, public lectures, and conferences, mostly in Paris. Our website hosts a number of journals, podcast series, and videos; and we also run our own publishing imprint, PICT Books. While our team is fully international, our primary language is English as the current lingua franca of the world.
PICT is a fully independent, volunteer-run organization that rejects state or corporate funding and is only supported by individual membership contributions. To remove economic barriers to participation, our entire in-person Arts & Humanities program is free for our members, all our online resources are open-access, and our books are affordably priced according to our non-profit ethos.
Our faculty members are free to create and design their courses according to their own interests, and our courses are open to everyone regardless of factors such as education level and age. To ensure lively discussion, courses are capped at 10 participants. We reject online teaching as well as credits, grades, diplomas, and any other means of standardizing or commodifying the learning experience.
Our online and printed publications aim to be jargon-free and driven by genuine concerns rather than the so-called publish-or-perish imperative endemic to academia. While our journals and books follow strict review guidelines, we are particularly concerned with giving a voice to persons, topics, and styles that are silenced by the gatekeeping functions of traditional academic publishing and peer review.
PICT hopes to show that a different kind of education is possible. However inevitable any institutionalized system confronting us might seem, we as individuals can always bond in solidarity to produce alternatives to it. The only real inevitability is change, and we aim to offer a concrete example of such change, an example that we hope will serve as inspiration to others.
