Page 95 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Links Enlightenment, epistemology, ethnocentrism, postmodernism, poststructuralism,
pragmatism, truth

72 Freire,Paulo (1921–1997) The Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire spent
a lifetime developing and integrating a philosophy of education and learning with
empirical research. His interest in the relationship between power, class and
education along with his radical pedagogy has been influential not so much in
terms of cultural studies theory (though there are exceptions to this) but upon
many of its practitioners, most of whom are teachers in higher education. For Freire,
education involves a dialogic relationship between teachers and students both of
whom learn, question, reflect and participate in making meaning. Freire stresses the
development of a critical consciousness that allows people to question and explore
the character of their society with a view to acting as subjects in creating a more
democratic culture.
• Associated concepts Cultural politics, dialogic, power, praxis, resistance, writing.
• Tradition(s) Humanism, Marxism.
• Reading Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939) Freud gained notoriety in the first decade of the
twentieth century as the originator of psychoanalysis, which he developed in
Vienna before being forced to flee in the face of the Nazis’ persecution of Jews.
According to Freud, the self is constituted in terms of an ego, or conscious rational
mind, a superego, or social conscience, and the unconscious, the source and
repository of the symbolic workings of repressed desire that is generated through
the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Freud’s proposition that sexuality is the key
to subjectivity and culture through the active operation of the unconscious in
everyday life is his most significant legacy. His work remains controversial and while
a number of cultural studies writers have embraced psychoanalysis in order to
explore gendered subjectivity, others have rejected it as phallocentric and
mythological.
Associated concepts Identification, Oedipus complex, sex, subjectivity, unconscious.
Tradition(s) Psychoanalysis.
Reading Freud, S. (1977, orig. 1905) Three Essays on Sexuality. The Pelican Freud
Library, Vol. 7. Harmondsworth: Penguin.