Book Review: Textos clave de la extensión crítica latinoamericana y caribeña (Key Readings on Critical Community Engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean)

Abstract

This book showcases the tradition and high level of entrenchment of community engagement in Latin American university culture. Specifically, it focuses on a branch called “Extensión Crítica” (critical community engagement), which emerges as a rescue and revalorization of the dialogic and transformative engagement perspectives that marked the practice and reflection on this subject in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America, in response to current neoliberal approaches to the linkage between university and society. The book aims to “contribute to a greater theoretical, epistemological and methodological density” (17) to the Latin American and Caribbean Critical Community Engagement movement. The book develops seven “conceptual matrices” from which the movement draws: the University Reform Movement tradition, Paulo Freire and popular education, Latin American critical thinking, feminist movement, anti-colonial perspectives, territory, and participatory methodologies. Three key readings were selected for each conceptual matrix. Nine authors developed its main structure and introductions, and 25 authors wrote the preliminary studies and biographical notes of the original authors of the 21 selected texts. This editorial project becomes a milestone in the tradition of Latin American community engagement, and the review contributes to a much-needed dialogue and collaboration among different Spanish-, Portuguese-, and English-speaking contexts.