Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher whose work reshaped debates about education, power and social change. His best-known book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (first published in Portuguese in 1968), argued that education is never neutral. It can reproduce existing social relations, or it can help people understand and challenge them. Freire attacked…

I have become aware that a good deal of my teaching and research circles around the same question: who gets to decide what things mean? It appears in photography when we ask why some images seem natural, truthful or beautiful while others seem strange. It appears in psychology when we examine how people come to…