Liberation Psychology: Another Kind Of Critical Psychology

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LIBERATION PSYCHOLOGY

Mark Burton and Luis Gómez

The emergence of Liberation Psychology, initially in Latin America, can best be understood as an attempt to reform psychological praxis in relation to the fundamental questions of colonization and decolonization in Latin America. This is to consider Liberation Psychology in terms of the dialogue between knowledge and practices in contexts marked by inequalities, exclusion, poverty, (neo)colonization and violence. Despite the changes of recent decades (Bethell, 2000), the history of Latin America, like other 'peripheral' (Wallerstein, 1996) regions of the world, can be seen in termsof ‘open veins’ for extraction and exploitation (Galeano, 1998) and, taking into account the interdependent dimensions that make this region the most unequal in the world (PNUD, 2011), where exclusion and poverty embody different expressions of violence, particularly in in some places, with recent memories of colonization and the signs of the coloniality of power, knowledge and being.The 'coloniality of power' (Quijano, 2000), wherein people andregions are accorded varying degrees of comparative value within a Eurocentric framework, is reflected in institutions, structures and subjectivities related to established hierarchies, inequalities and foreign interests imposed on themajority of the population. The rules and practices of the Washington Consensus, Structural Adjustment and Free Trade Agreements are just chapters in the long history of policies and practices responsible for constructing unfair situations for the wider sectors of the population.

In this context Liberation Psychology emerged as one instance a constellation of critical alternative praxis (Flores, 2009), each intervention a response to the inadequacyof its discipline to confront the problems here described in terms of coloniality , including Philosophy of Liberation, Theology of Liberation, Popular Pedagogy , Sociology of Exploitation, Dependency Theory and Theatre of the Oppressed.

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All of them share as articulating notions praxis, problematization and awareness of or articulation with social movements.

Ignacio Martín-Baró's intervention

A variety of responses to the crisis of psychology's social relevance too. emerged in various parts of the world, but whatemerged from Latin America was distinctive. There had been earlier uses of the term ‘Liberation Psychology’ but it is Martín-Baró's formulation that was decisive in shaping what wenow know as Liberation Psychology. It is not easy to summarisewhat was an evolving approach to reformulating psychology since although he summarised this in some programmatic articles (Martín-Baró, 1985a, 1986, 1996c, 1996d, 1998) and these are available in English, an understanding of his distinctive orientation requires a consideration of a larger body of his work, and specifically his two textbooks of socialpsychology (Martín-Baró, 1983, 1989b), his work on violence and war (Blanco and de la Corte Ibañez, 2003; Martín-Baró, 1988, 2000) and his public opinion research (Martín-Baró, 1985b, 1989a, 1996a). Nevertheless, ‘Towards a Liberation psychology’ (Martín-Baró, 1986b, 1996d) outlines his overall project.

Martín-Baró was a practising priest, working at one of the centres of liberation theology, the University of Central America in San Salvador, and in that article he used liberation theology as an organising framework, identifying ‘three essential elements for the construction of a psychologyof the liberation of the Latin American peoples’. They were:

A ‘new horizon’: an outward turn from preoccupation with the scientific and social status of the discipline, and redefinition of purpose in terms of the needs and interests of the majority of the Latin American people whose needs had been neglected both in the universities and in professional practice.

‘A new epistemology’ where the criterion for psychology'srelevance, and indeed truth, is found through its

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interrogation by those popular Latin American majorities in a lived process of revision. That would not involve a rejection of all previously existing psychology but critically sifting its models and theories, discovering their ‘validity or deficiency, their usefulness or uselessness, their universality or provincialism ... their potential for liberation or subjugation’ (1996d: 27).

‘A new praxis’: rather than merely academically adopting an assumed perspective of the oppressed other, knowledge will come from the attempt to transform that reality. This involves ‘an activity that transforms reality.

The diversity and contradictions in this approach

Liberation Psychology can be thought of as a social movement. Not only is it a movement of psychologists who see themselves as working against traditional psychologies by constructing analternative way of doing psychology, with their own support systems such as networks, collectives, congresses, email lists, and publications that have a paradigm-defining function. But, consistently with its 'option for the oppressedand excluded' with whom the alternative psychology is co-constructed, it is itself part of an ecosystem of diverse social movements and struggles. There is a deep connection betwen participants of the Liberation Psychology movement and causes and organizations in defence of human rights, the rightto water, against the neoliberal model, against the criminalization of protest, for sexual diversity rights (CostaRica), for creating new frameworks to understand peace and conflict (Colombia), and, for historical memory (and against impunity (Guatemala, Chile), among others (Baltodano, 2011; Dobles, Baltodano, and Leandro Zuniga, 2007; Dobles, Fernández, Fournier, Amador, and Bolaños, 2012; Dobles and Baltodano, 2010; Fox and Prilleltensky, 1997; Martín-Baró, 1983, 1989, 2003; Montero and Sonn, 2009; Montero, 2004; Prilleltensky, 2006 ).

The intellectual concerns of Liberation Psychology are the subject of three areas of debate:

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Its political dimension concerns the commitment to social movements and communities, and the development of methodologies adequate to the situation and actors.

Its ethical dimension concerns research on, and exposure of, the dynamics of oppression, discrimination, racism, xenophobia and, the infringement of human rights.

Its epistemological dimension concerns the debate with other bodies of knowledge and critical practices to enrich the heritage of ways of resisting, of emancipation and liberation.

These dimensions define the concerns, tensions and, contradictions that together challenge the quietism and alienation of other concepts and methods related to traditional psychology. Consequently the field of LP is characterised by a diversity of approaches and by constant discussion and reflection.

Liberation psychology has influenced the practice of manypsychologists. This can be difficult to document because by definition much practice is not recorded or described systematically. Where it is documented publicly there can be akind of selection bias, so it is the more academically oriented work that is described. Liberation Psychology concepts have been used in community social psychology, in Latin America, Europe, Asia, North America, and in therapeuticwork with a variety of marginalised groups (refugees and victims of torture, women who experience(d) domestic violence,disabled people, LGBT people, and so on) (Afuape, 2011; Doblesand Baltodano, 2010; Dobles, Baltodano, and Leandro, 2007; Guzzo and Lacerda, 2011; Moane, 2011; Montero and Sonn, 2009; Sacipa, in press). In both contexts there is emphasis on countering ideological constructions and their internalisationand the collective construction of social action. The recoveryof historical memory, commemoration and its use as a positive resource, for re-signification and construction of alternativesocial relations, is both a therapeutic and a collective community resource in the key processes of conscientization and de-ideoloisation.

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It should be said however that like any innovative approach, LP can attract those whose contribution is not really in the spirit of the field. This can happen in two ways.

1) The existence of a platform attracts those practising psychology that has little or no liberatory content. For example, the international congresses of Liberation Psychology, of which there have been eleven in various Latin American countries, between 1998 and 2012, have been open and inclusive, attracting large local and international contingents, so perhaps this 'fraying of the edges' is inevitable., and not all the contributions have been relevant to the mission of Liberation Psychology.

2) As one critical psychologist with a long term interestin the psychology of liberation remarked, 'it can be hardto see what the psychological content is'. This is most apparent in the Spanish language email list where perhapsthe majority of the posts are reproductions of general news stories with only a minority focusing on the projectof a critically reconstructed pro-oppressed psychologicalpraxis. It is arguable that both tendencies can erode the distinctive focus and contribution of liberation psychology.

Liberation Psychology as a critique of psychology

Critique of the uncritical adoption of models from the North

One of the most salient stances of LP, is its rejection of theuncritical adoption of knowledge from the ‘North’. The questioning of that imported reason, with its formulaic truths, is the posing of the epistemological problem wherein ‘the understanding of our reality ends up mediated by what schemata designed in other worlds can capture’ (Martín-Baró, 1987a, p.: 304). ‘The problem with the concepts and models when used is not so much in what they see as in how they see, and above all, it is not so much what they make visible as in what they don't capture;

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that is to say, not in their positivity but in in their negativity’ (Martín-Baró, 1989, p.: 325).

Moreover those schemata tend to be mediated by the traps of a theoretical apriorism that forces reality into predetermined categories, assuming a unidirectional and mechanical causality and the assumption of a Manichean dualism. All these assumptions were discarded by natural science a long time ago. LP considers them to be unnecessary baggage: Martín-Baró (1986/1998: 315-316n) saw a kind of partial and limited objectivity resulting from an awareness ofboth the conditions under which knowledge is constructed and the values that guide praxis.

In order go beyond that PL establishes as criteria the problematization of the relationships between the interests ofruling classes and the decontextualized use of theories in thename of those interests. As a result it questions the pretension of universality implicit in the uncritical adoptionof models , without falling into the trap of ‘psychological patriotism’ which denies the importance of approaches from other parts of the world for reflection, thereby proclaiming itself as the only truth.

The challenges for Liberation Psychology, then, lie in the formulation of problems, definition of theoretical frameworks and the construction of safeguards for objectivity , all of which require de-coding of concepts and methodologies originating from diverse experiences in order tobuild categories and instruments according to the commitment to understand complex realities and to transform ourselves in the process.

Critique of complicity with power

Considering that ‘the greater part of social psychological knowledge has its roots in the perspective of established power’ (Martín-Baró, 1983: viii), one important way for LP to disrupt this complicity with power has been to use committed knowledge, capable of going beyond the false dichotomy betweenscience and commitment, with objectives such as the rethinkingof its theoretical models in several directions, the foremost being to transcend its conceptual heritage in order to

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strengthen support for the interests of the oppressed.This challenging of power using epistemological inquiry, questioning the normalized criteria of truth that are used to validate knowledge and relations of power, consequently demands conceptually reviewing the contextual boundaries of concepts. Moreover, the criteria of praxis, used with careful consideration of people's voices. means focussing on the achievements of applied scientific knowledge, with respect to the most important problems of populations worldwide

All this assumes the importance of the tasks of liberation, that in the case of LP had been defined within thestudy of social movements, their forms of conscience, organizational capabilities, as well as the analysis of those movements as instruments and collective subjects both in resistance and in the construction of options for well-being.

Critique of individualising and victim-blaming ideology

A third way in which LP is a critique of dominant psychology is in its non-individualistic and pro-victim stances, which gotogether. One of Martín-Baró's key articles (Martín-Baró, 1987b, 1996b) was a critique of the ideological construction of the 'lazy Latino' that has characterised both external and internal perceptions of the 'essential character' of the 'Latin American'. Martín-Baró analyses this construction in popular imagination, literature and in social scientific theory, using a variety of research evidence to demonstrate that the lack of support for a general characteristic of fatalism, as either essential or as socially constructed but then functionally autonomous character. He shows how fatalism is not characteristic of Latin Americans in general. So it does not characterise the elites, nor those involved in socialmovements or in the changed social conditions of post-revolutionary Cuba: it is characteristic of specific social and historical conditions. Moreover where attempts to change social conditions have been defeated, fatalism reflects that social reality (cf. Mepham, 1972), ideologically offering meaning to the oppressed but cementing domination by the ruling classes. As he points out (1996b: 214), ‘A society's structural reality is not a fact of nature, but of history.

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Its construction and functioning lie in the intersubjectivity of the groups and persons who make it up. … What brings about domination is not ideas, but rather power in social relations,acquired through the appropriation of resources most necessaryfor human life. … But such domination is not firmly established until individuals accept it psychologically, untilit becomes a conception of life, and indeed common sense.’

This rejection of mainstream psychology's individualism characterises the 'really social psychology' of Liberation Psychology (Burton and Kagan, 2009). Society is conflictual and power is omnipresent, rooted in distinct social interests.So power is understood not just on an interpersonal basis but in terms of its organisation in society (Martín-Baró, 1989b: 91–188). The conception is dialectical, overcoming a dualisticconception of the relation individual-society, replacing it with a transformational understanding of the co-construction of society and persons (Bhaskar, 1979) wherein the person is both product and active reproducer-transformer of social relations.

Critical assimilation of psychological concepts

A contrast can be made between the rather eclectic approach ofMartín-Baró in particular, and Liberation Psychology in general, and the kind of purism that can characterise some other currents of critical psychology. This applies both to theory and to method. Yet the approach is not an uncritical 'anything goes' eclecticism, instead concepts and methods are used in order to understand the processes of oppression, and to support liberatory action. Martín-Baró, for instance used rather traditional opinion research techniques to challenge toway the Salvadorian military government presented the views ofthe population both internally and internationally – this was as he noted a means of de-ideologising social reality. As the various collections of Liberation Psychology papers attest (Dobles and Baltodano, 2010; Dobles et al., 2007; Guzzo and Lacerda, 2011; Montero and Sonn, 2009; Vázquez, 2000), psychologists working with a liberatory approach have utilisedmethods as diverse as participatory action research, photo-voice, community therapy, drama, and ideology-critique, as

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well as the more orthodox approaches of literature review, content analysis and survey methods. Conceptually, Martín-Baróalmost seamlessly integrated the classic (North American and European) literature of general social psychology with theory from sociology, anthropology and political science, combining empiricist, psychodynamic, gestalt, Marxist and even the then emerging post-structuralist ideas. And workers in fields such as critical community psychology (Burton and Kagan, 2009; Kagan, Burton, Duckett, Lawthom, and Siddiquee, 2011; Montero and Serrano García, 2011; Rocha Brandao and Aurea Cruz Bomfin,1999; Seedat, Duncan, Lazarus, Duncan, and Lazarus, 2001; Ximenes, Amaral, and Rebouças, 2008), which is strongly influenced by liberation psychology, have similarly utilised arich diversity of conceptual and practical resources from within and outside psychology's supposed disciplinary boundary. Liberation psychology practice then can be understood as a kind of critically constructive bricolage.

A distinctive kind of critical psychology

Martín-Baró's overall method, then, can be broadly characterised as the critical and committed (re)construction of a psychology to address the most important social problems of the oppressed, taking the perspective and history of the oppressed and the social contexts into account. On the theoretical level, best demonstrated in the two social psychology textbooks (Martín-Baró, 1983, 1989b), this involveda creative but rigorous re-writing of social psychology that involved four elements. 1) The selective use of mainstream psychological concepts, which are approached critically. This body of literature accounts for the largest part of the citations in the two books. 2) Their augmentation and amendment from other intellectual traditions (Latin American as in the case of Freire and Fals-Borda, and to some extent from other regions, for example he cites Fanon and Alatas, as well as some European psychologists). 3) The addition of societal-level concepts (e.g. class), largely from sociology and political theory. 4) The integration of these in a cohesive account of social psychology that overcomes the limitations if individualist and reductionist social

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psychology without falling into the error of 'methodological collectivism' (Bhaskar, 1979), nor of merely stating generalities. This approach at the theoretical level is also followed in his work on specific social issues: housing and overcrowding, violence and war, gender relations, and the representation of public opinion.

There is something of a risk here in that concepts with different ontological, epistemological and pragmatic assumptions are fused into an uneasy co-eistence. Yet the riskis worth running so long as it is taken with an understanding,strengthened by the influence of subaltern partners, of those assumptions when re-framing and utilising the wider theoretical and practical repertoire thereby made available. There is no pure theory or method, but rather a potentially enormous inventory of imperfect and ideologically constructed tools: hence the importance of de-ideologization.

A contrast with other critical psychologies

A distinction has to be made with the almost hegemonic postmodernist and social constructionist 'critical psychology'that developed in Europe and elsewhere Several writers (Burton, 2013c; de la Corte Ibañez, 2000; Lacerda, 2010; Montero, 2000), have contrasted this with the explicitly ethical project of Martín-Baró. As de la Corte explains, ‘... the influence of the postmodern turn seems to promote not so much a a critical social psychology but a critique of social psychology. This cannot be reconstructed because there is no base on which to assure trustworthy and universal knowledge, rendering as vanities all the basic functions attributed to scientific knowledge (explanation, understanding, prediction).... the proposal of Martín-Baró is not to destroy psychology but to reconstruct it, trying to plant an alternative to each of its criticisms, through the example of its own scientific activity.’ That is to say, the Liberation Psychology of Martín-Baró, and of those who have followed, is neither modernist nor postmodernist but to use Dussel's term 'transmodern'. It rejects the pretension of the modernist enlightenment tradition that turns a particular region's rationality, founded on colonialism, into a universal

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definition of reason and rightness, but it does not reject thesearch for universal standards of morality or explanation. Through the critical interlocution of the oppressed, 'other' (the missing base that de la Corte is alluding to above) it seeks to clarify and correct. This de-ideologization is not, asimple 'cleansing of false consciousness', but a dialectical process that goes beyond the envelope of the modern world view, synthesising new understandings that draw both on 'Western reason' and on usually submerged knowledges and ethics. In this we can locate Liberation Psychology within thede-colonial paradigm (Escobar, 2007).

A socially engaged critical praxis

In the development of Liberation Psychology since 1989, these themes can be seen at work, above all in the 'analectic' (a multiple dialectic that goes beyond the totality of thesis andantithesis) praxis hand in hand with the active subjects of social movements and their members.

Commitment to social problems has led Liberation Psychologists to examine the relationships among memory, resistance, community, social movements, policy and ideology critique as part of the action and reflection that characterises the praxis of Liberation Psychology.

As with all critical encounter with social realities, understanding them is aided by taking a historical perspectiveon the paths that led to the present context, taking in the frustrated dreams and hopes along the way. Given this, the social processes of the construction of memory are of particular importance as articulating social relations built up through the medium of the processes and practices that define them. In their turn they are bound up with 'regimes of truth' in which there are determinate elaborations are erectedover memories: as Dobles (2009: 42) suggests in Foucauldian terms, they are intertwined ‘through a series of arrangements, institutions,rituals, places, visual and spatial mechanisms … that facilitate the elaboration of specific reminiscence of the past, in the context of contemporary power relations’.

These current power relations are reproduced but also contested, since where there is power there is resistance. Liberation Psychology maps the 'grammar of change' of this

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resistance, seeing it as the product of existing social tensions, having porous boundaries and orientated to a counter-hegemonic ethical horizon of liberation. So LiberationPsychology, in aspiring to be politically critical, has to assume the political character of power-knowledge relationships and know how to map the alternatives of liberation. This requires the adoption of ideology critique (Jameson, 2009) in relation to proposed options and processes.

The dialogue in recent years of Liberation Psychologists with social movements and community practice has helped to problematise the de-politicisation of social conflicts and theneed to adopt a clear political agenda to constitute more radically the dreams of liberation. The urgency of this is imposed by the crisis of the capitalist order as it intensifies its strategies to ensure continued accumulation inthe wake of shocks and disasters (Klein, 2008).

Perhaps Liberation Psychology is not so much a variety ofpsychological praxis in itself but rather, a way of approaching psychological praxis. As such its influence can beseen in a number of different areas of concern. The extent to which the meta-theory of Liberation Psychology is explicit varies within and between these areas, with in some cases the articulation of the praxis with the paradigm only being made post hoc, with some people coming to the conclusion that ‘I had been doing liberation psychology for some years without realising it’. The areas where there has been most influence are, 1) social conflict, its consequences and responses. 2) Community psychology, mostly with communities (of place and of interest) facing various forms of social exclusion and threat.3) Political psychology, with the emphasis on public policy and subaltern social movements. However this short list far from exhausts both the influence of LP and its areas of explicit application which extends to areas such as education, the criminaland civil justice system, and health. In a short space it is impossibleto do justice to the diversity and in order to do this the first of these areas will be outlined.

A major theme in Latin America has been the social conflict and repression that has characterised much of the continent. This has included: Work with the victims of torture; Work with families of the disappeared or murdered;

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Work with displaced populations and accompaniment of people in‘limit situations’; Campaigns for the acknowledgement of crimes, reparations and against impunity; Analysis of the peace processes; Research on the consequences of a culture of violence. (for references to all these areas see Burton, 2013b: 255.)

Liberation Psychology offers particularly relevant concepts that help link the world of personal experience of victims and survivors and the political dimension. In Chile, the work of the ILAS organisation began from psychotherapeuticwork with those who had been tortured under the fascist dictatorship, in the face of officially sanctioned forgetting (Lira, 2001). It extended to work with families of the disappeared. The documentation of testimonies was influential in enabling the Chilean public to face the facts of human rights abuses. The project of seeking recognition and redress on the national political level helped people to 'rediscover an existential project' facing outwards from the traumatic experience . Similar work has been conducted in Colombia (Sacipa, in press; Sacipa, Ballesteros, Cardozo, Novoa, and Tovar, 2006) and Guatemala (Flores, 2011; Lykes, 2000). In thelatter case the genocide against the indigenous Maya communities has been the focus of inter-disciplinary effort that included the exhumation of victims and reburial with respectful traditional ceremony. Underpinning all the diverse work have been the following principles: 1) the emphasis on the importance of memory rather than the forgetting typically advocated by the State. 2) the overcoming of an inward-lookingand individual experience of trauma with the use of collectiveand public enactments of commemoration. 3) The use of the cultural resources of the people themselves as a vitally integral part of the processes of individual-collective healing. 4) The critique of received concepts such as post-traumatic stress disorder (Portillo, 2005) together with the use of concepts from mainstream psychology (Gaborit,, 2007). While the work described is Latin American, major social conflict, its consequences, its perpetrators and its victims do not know national frontiers and psychologists in other contexts have also used a liberation psychology orientation intheir work (Afuape, 2011; Agger and Buus Jensen, 1996; Montiel

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and Belo, 2012).

Conclusion: Possibilities and challenges

The world has changed since the murder of Martín-Baró in 1989.These changes can be summarised in terms of the advance of colonising capitalism globally, both as system of accumulation-exploitation and as ideological hegemon, under the cloak of 'advancing' liberal democracy. This in itself poses serious challenges for a transformative and liberating social psychological praxis while also suggesting some priorities for LP, both as intellectual framework and as social movement.

Yet the neoliberal model has more recently itself approached a crisis state following the crash of financial bubbles in 2008-9, the rise of different models of accumulation, and of left and decolonising movements both in Latin America and elsewhere. These developments are themselvesa result of the contradictions of capitalist expansion and colonisation, the most profound of which is the climate and ecological emergency that threatens the very foundation of life on earth. As we have implied elsewhere (Burton, 2013c) this new political situation demands a turn to a more action-orientated, less 'academic', critical psychology, an opportunity but also a challenge for liberation psychologies. The challenge consists in developing a praxis that building onthe legacy of liberation psychology, connects the psychological with the political, economic, ecological and cultural in a way that truly creates new knowledge and strategies for resisting the domination of people and nature prefiguratively while creating new possible worlds.

As noted above, violence has been a key topic for Liberation Psychology throughout its history and indeed has acted as a litmus for its claims to social relevance. Yet the phenomena of violence faced have changed somewhat since 1989. In Mexico and Central America, for example there has been the growth of violence in relation to drugs from both criminal andState agents and the growth of street gangs ('maras'), themselves a consequence of war, exile and US policy from the 1980s. Elsewhere there has been both conservative terrorism

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and State 'humanitarian violence', and more broadly the increased recognition of domestic and sexual violence (Moane, 2011), again amplified by social conflicts (Estrada, Ibarra, and Sarmiento, 2007). Liberation Psychology does suggest possibilities for theorising violence in its objective and subjective dimensions in terms of both ideological action and psychosocial mediations, from the social structure into the structure of people's personality and action. Violence is analysed in terms of the formal structure of violent acts, the'personal equation', the enabling context and the framing of all of this by the ideological background. The approach goes beyond the analytic limits of instinctivist, behavioural and historical approaches, offering instead a nuanced, integrativeapproach (Martín-Baró, 2000, 2003). As we saw above, it has developed a praxis based on making violence and its perpetrators visible, on re-signification of violent acts withthe victims, and through interventions for justice at the national level.

Liberation Psychology makes little sense in isolation from liberatory social movements. Recent decades have seen both advances and retreats including, on the one hand, 1) the development and consolidation of connections and cooperation between them, both globally and locally, underpinned by opposition to neoliberal globalisation and the recognition of the interplay among the different kinds of oppression, and (2)new and creative formats of protest and resistance. On the other hand there have been challenges including: (1) criminalization of social movements, (2) difficulties translating demands, strategies and alternatives between different movements and other non-organized sectors of society; (3) problems in dialogue with the State because it tends to impose asymmetrical conditions on the process of solving problems. It remains questionable how much Liberation Psychology has adapted to these openings and limitations.

Martín-Baró used an explicit strategy of making connections with like minded colleagues in other locations (Harris, 1990). However, that was difficult before the advent of the internet. There are now much better connections betweenpsychologists of a liberatory orientation,and improved dissemination of the growing body of work. As a result,

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workers in locations as diverse as Turkey, Palestine, the Phillipines, New Zealand, Malaysia, and South Africa have seenthe relevance of the approach, adapted it to their own social contexts and made contributions to it (Burton, 2013a; Montero and Sonn, 2009; O’Connor, Tilyard, and Milfont, 2011; Seedat et al., 2001). However, language remains an issue, with Spanish not generally understood in Asia and Africa, and only by a minority of English speaking psychologists. Portuguese isused in parts of Africa, and in newly independent Timor Leste,but despite many of the background concepts having emerged in lusophone Brazil, there has only been limited translation of the Spanish literature into Portuguese (two articles, ‘Towardsa Liberation Psychology’ and ‘Challenges and Perspectives for Latin American Psychology’ appear in Guzzo and Lacerda, 2011),although the barrier between the two linguistic communities isnot high. Nevertheless it is worth the effort to construct a variety of networks for sharing theory and practice, as well as to build solidarity links given the risks run by some workers in this field (in addition to Martín-Baró, there have been murders and disappearances of liberatory psychologists inplaces such as Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico and serious threats inColombia and elsewhere), while the work of exposing oppressionand standing beside the oppressed can and does lead to silencing of which murder is the most extreme form.

As we have argued elsewhere (Burton, 2013d), liberation psychology is too valuable a praxis to be seen as just something that is done in Latin America: to borrow from the strap line of a recent conference in occupied Palestine, we want to construct a psychology that is both ‘globally aware and locally appropriate’, that increases understanding of the universal mechanisms and dynamics of oppression and how to combat it, while being flexible enough to respond to the particularities of oprression and liberation in diverse socialand political settings.

Further reading and web-links and reference list.

Weblink

http://libpsy.org English Language Liberation Psychology 16

Network.

Reference list (recommended reading is starred)

Afuape, T. (2011). Power, resistance and liberation in therapy with survivors of trauma. London: Routledge. *

Agger, I., and Buus Jensen, S. (1996). Trauma and Healing under State Terrorism. London: Zed. *

Aron, A., and Corne, S. (Eds.). (1996). Ignacio Martín-Baró: Writings for a Liberation Psychology. New York: Harvard University Press. *

Bhaskar, R. (1979). On the possibility of social scientific knowledge and the limits of naturalism. In J. Mepham and D.-H. Ruben (Eds.), Issues in Marxist philosophy: Epistemology, science, ideology (Vol. 3) (pp. 107–139). Brighton: Harvester.

Blanco, A. (Ed.) (1998). Ignacio Martín-Baró: Psicología de la liberación. Madrid: Trotta.

Blanco, A., and de la Corte Ibañez, L. (Eds.) (2003). Ignacio Martín Baró: Poder, ideología y violencia. Madrid: Trotta.

Burton, M. (2013a). ¿Existe la psicología de la liberación fuera de América latina? Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología Social: Ignacio Martín-Baró, 2(1), 158–170.

Burton, M. (2013b). Liberation Psychology: a constructive critical praxis. Estudos de Psicologia (Campinas), 30(2), 249–259. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0103-166X2013000200011

*Burton, M. (2013c). The analectic turn: critical psychology

and the new political context. Les Cahiers de Psychologie Polítique, (23), online http://lodel.irevues.inist.fr/cahierspsychologiepolitique/index.php?id=2465

Burton, M. (2013d). A second Psychology of Liberation? Valuingand moving beyond the Latin American. The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, 13(2), 96–106.

Burton, M., and Kagan, C. (2009). Towards a really social psychology: Liberation Psychology beyond Latin America. In M. Montero and C. Sonn (Eds.), The Psychology of Liberation. Theory and Application (pp. 51–73). New York: Springer.

De la Corte Ibañez, L. (2000). La psicología de Ignacio Martín-Baró como psicología social crítica. Una

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presentación de su obra. Revista de Psicología General y Aplicada, 53(3), 437–450 also available at http://www.copmadrid.org/pspolitica/baro.htm accessed 10 February, 2007.

Dobles, I., and Baltodano, S. (Eds.) (2010). Psicología: dominación,compromiso y transformación social. Ciudad Universitaria RodrigoFacio, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica.

Dobles, I., Baltodano, S., and Leandro, V. (Eds.). (2007). Psicología de la Liberación en el Contexto de la Globalización Neoliberal: Acciones, reflexiones y desafíos. Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica.

Dussel, E. (2013). Ethics of liberation in the age of globalization and exclusion. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press. (Original Spanish version, 1998). )

Escobar, A. (2007). Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The LatinAmerican modernity/ coloniality research program. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 179–210. doi:10.1080/09502380601162506 *

Estrada, A. M., Ibarra, C., and Sarmiento, E. (2007). Regulation and control of subjectivity and private life in the context of armed conflict in Colombia. Community, Work and Family, 10(3), 257 – 281.

Flores, J. M. (2009). Praxis and Liberation in the Context of Latin American Theory. In M. Montero and C. Sonn (Eds.), Psychology of Liberation: Theory and Applications. New York: Springer.

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