Where is Paulo Freire?

Abstract

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian thinker and educator. His pedagogic, academic and political trajectory left a vast legacy that is still of great relevance. However, his epistemological proposal has not been systematized despite of its importance for the field of critical communication research. In fact, he has been silenced, marginalized and misread in the academic agenda, both in the North and in the South, to fit research models which accommodate well to the neoliberal subjectivity, and which deactivate the transformative character of Freire’s proposal. In this article, we question Freire’s absence in dominant critical social theory, to subsequently synthesize Freirean epistemology as a cogno-emotional cycle with two juxtaposed ontological dimensions based on vulnerability and consciousness. We further question whether it is possible that the Freirean proposal serves as the general epistemological frame for practices and disciplines which are geared towards social transformation, namely, those which compose the field of socio-praxis.