| Objectives: |
This course aims to introduce students to the major traditions, concepts, debates, and political concerns of critical psychology. The course examines how psychological knowledge has been historically produced, institutionalized, and used in relation to power, classification, subjectivity, normality, and social control. It encourages students to critically evaluate mainstream psychology through perspectives such as historical revisionism, paradigm critique, Foucauldian analysis, postcolonial and decolonial thought, feminist psychology, critical race perspectives, critiques of neoliberal subjectivity, anti-psychiatry, neurodiversity, animal subjectivity, and liberation psychology. By the end of the course, students are expected to understand psychology as a historically situated, socially embedded, and politically consequential field of knowledge and practice. |
| Content: |
The contents of the course include introductions to critical psychologies; critical history and revisionism; paradigm shifts and methodological anarchism; modernity and the Cartesian subject; Foucault’s analyses of madness, classification, surveillance, panopticism, and praxis; postcolonialism, Fanon, and decolonial therapy; gender, family, race, racialization, and psychological power; neoliberal subjectivity, pop psychology, and the psy-complex; critical perspectives on mental health and psychiatry; development and neurodiversity; the place of nonhuman animals in psychological research; and contemporary horizons for liberation psychology. |