The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:
Frantz Omar Fanon was a French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique. His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement, and was the third most cited book in the social sciences as of 2016 according to Google Scholar.
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.
Liberation psychology or liberation social psychology is an approach to psychology that aims to actively understand the psychology of oppressed and impoverished communities by conceptually and practically addressing the oppressive sociopolitical structure in which they exist. The central concepts of liberation psychology include: awareness; critical realism; de-ideologized reality; a coherently social orientation; the preferential option for the oppressed majorities, and methodological eclecticism.Through transgressive and reconciliatory approaches, liberation psychology strives to mend the fractures in relationships, experience, and society caused by oppression. Liberation psychology aims to include what or who has become marginalized, both psychologically and socially. The philosophy of liberation psychology stresses the interconnectedness and co-creation of culture, psyche, self, and community. They should be viewed as interconnected and evolving multiplicities of perspectives, performances, and voices in various degrees of dialogue. Liberation psychology was first conceived by the Spanish/Salvadoran Psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró and developed extensively in Latin America. Liberation psychology is an interdisciplinary approach that draws on liberation philosophy, Marxist, feminist, and decolonial thought, liberation theology, critical theory, critical and popular pedagogy, as well as critical psychology subareas, particularly critical social psychology.
Gustavo Gutiérrez-Merino Díaz was a Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and Dominican priest who was one of the founders of liberation theology in Latin America. His 1971 book A Theology of Liberation is considered pivotal to the formation of liberation theology. He held the John Cardinal O'Hara Professorship of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and was a visiting professor at universities in North America and Europe.
Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality critical school of thought.
Critical consciousness, conscientization, or conscientização in Portuguese, is a popular education and social concept developed by Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist Paulo Freire, grounded in neo-Marxist critical theory. Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a book by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, written in Portuguese between 1967 and 1968, but published first in Spanish in 1968. An English translation was published in 1970, with the Portuguese original being published in 1972 in Portugal, and then again in Brazil in 1974. The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy, and proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society.
Black Skin, White Masks is a 1952 book by philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The book is written in the style of autoethnography, with Fanon sharing his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche.
Latin American subaltern studies was a group founded in 1992 by John Beverley and Ileana Rodríguez. Inspired by the South Asian Subaltern Studies group, its aim was to apply a similar perspective to Latin American studies. It was one of the more important recent developments within Latin American cultural studies, though in the end the group folded owing to internal differences that were both scholarly and political.
Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini was an Argentine-Mexican academic, philosopher, historian and theologian. He served as the interim rector of the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México from 2013 to 2014.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s, as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism, developing a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
The Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) is a philosophical organization founded in 2002 at the Center for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies, in Mona, Jamaica. The founding members were George Belle, B. Anthony Bogues, Patrick Goodin, Lewis Gordon, Clevis Headley, Paget Henry, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Charles Mills, and Supriya Nair. The association promotes the view that philosophy is the "rigorous theoretical reflection about fundamental problems faced by humanity", and that Caribbean philosophy in particular should be seen as "a transdisciplinary form of interrogation informed by scholarly knowledges as well as by practices and artistic expressions that elucidate fundamental questions that emerge in contexts of 'discovery,' conquest, racial, gender, and sexual domination, genocide, dependency, and exploitation as well as freedom, emancipation, and decolonization."
The coloniality of power is a concept interrelating the practices and legacies of European colonialism in social orders and forms of knowledge, advanced in postcolonial studies, decoloniality, and Latin American subaltern studies, most prominently by Anibal Quijano. It identifies and describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlived formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders. The concept identifies the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism in Latin America that prescribed value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.
Decoloniality is a school of thought that aims to delink from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being in the world in order to enable other forms of existence on Earth. It critiques the perceived universality of Western knowledge and the superiority of Western culture, including the systems and institutions that reinforce these perceptions. Decolonial perspectives understand colonialism as the basis for the everyday function of capitalist modernity and imperialism.
Santiago Castro-Gómez is a Colombian philosopher, a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the former director of the Pensar Institute in Bogotá.
Decolonization of knowledge is a concept advanced in decolonial scholarship that critiques the perceived hegemony of Western knowledge systems. It seeks to construct and legitimize other knowledge systems by exploring alternative epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. It is also an intellectual project that aims to "disinfect" academic activities that are believed to have little connection with the objective pursuit of knowledge and truth. The presumption is that if curricula, theories, and knowledge are colonized, it means they have been partly influenced by political, economic, social and cultural considerations. The decolonial knowledge perspective covers a wide variety of subjects including philosophy, science, history of science, and other fundamental categories in social science.
Coloniality of knowledge is a concept that Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano developed and adapted to contemporary decolonial thinking. The concept critiques what proponents call the Eurocentric system of knowledge, arguing the legacy of colonialism survives within the domains of knowledge. For decolonial scholars, the coloniality of knowledge is central to the functioning of the coloniality of power and is responsible for turning colonial subjects into victims of the coloniality of being, a term that refers to the lived experiences of colonized peoples.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is a Puerto Rican philosopher and professor in Philosophy at University of Connecticut-Storrs. He received his PhD from Brown University in Religious Studies. His work has been influential in contributing to ideas about decoloniality decolonizing epistemology, and in critiquing Western liberalism and Eurocentrism. He is influenced by the works of Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, and Enrique Dussel.
