Liberation Psychology

This course explores the central question: What would psychology look like if it were organized around collective liberation rather than individual adjustment to oppressive systems? Drawing on the community-based, participatory scholarship of Ignacio Martín-Baró, Paulo Friere, Augusto Boal, Mary Watkins and the contemporary Healing Justice movement, students will engage with developmental psychology through a liberation framework. Core texts include Mary Watkins' Toward Psychologies of Liberation and Tessa Hicks Peterson & Hala Khouri's Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change, which ground the course in dialogical, relational, and systems-oriented approaches to healing and social transformation.

Students will examine human development across the lifespan while analyzing how racism, colonization, gendered violence, economic inequality, ableism, and environmental injustice shape psychological life. Particular attention is given to how carceral logic—risk management, surveillance, pathologization, confinement, and behavioral control—operates within contemporary psychology, including diagnostic systems, schooling, healthcare, and correctional institutions. Students critically evaluate dominant developmental theories alongside community-rooted and culturally responsive alternatives.

Learning Objectives include: (1) applying developmental psychology theories across the lifespan through critical and liberationist lenses; (2) analyzing how structural oppression and carceral systems shape cognitive, emotional, and social development; (3) critically evaluating dominant mental health paradigms in relation to power and social control; and (4) articulating community-based, non-carceral approaches to healing and collective well-being. 

Course meetings will integrate lecture, interactive workshops, and seminar discussions. Students will engage theory, case analysis, dialogic inquiry, and praxis-oriented exercises linking developmental science to lived experience and institutional critique. Students will complete a community-based arts or activism project applying liberation psychology principles in real-world contexts. Projects may include participatory art, public education campaigns, mutual aid initiatives, or facilitated community dialogue. An hour and a half of weekly asynchronous class time will be spent on community-based project work. 

This course will be best suited for students who have some prior experience of engagement with their own social identities within systems of power.  

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

4 - Liberation Psychology