Barbara J Love, Social Justice Education, Multicultural Organizations

Developing a Liberatory Consciousness

Liberatory consciousness is a framework used to maintain an awareness of the dynamics of oppression characterizing society without giving in to despair and hopelessness about that condition and enabling us practice intentionality about changing systems of oppression.

Awareness

Developing the capacity to notice what is going on in the world around us, and continually interrogating our observations from a liberatory perspective.

Analysis

interrogating what we see happening in the world around us from a liberatory perspective. It means asking whether the reality that we can name moves toward deliberation or away from it. If it moves away from liberation, what needs to happen to put it on track toward liberation.

Accountability

Asking what, if anything needs to happen to move the reality that we are witnessing or experiencing on a path toward liberation, and what our role should be in that movement.

Action/Allyship

Refers to the support that we provide each other in mirroring our liberatory intentions back to each other, and the assistance we provide to each other in adjusting our perspective, language, and behavior in the course of our work, and the pursuit of liberation.

Dr. Barbara J. Love

Mission:

To foster the creation of liberatory consciousness for personal, organizational and societal transformation.
To facilitate systems of peer based healing from the trauma of oppression including racism and internalized racism, colonialism and internalized colonialism, genocide, war, and other identity based trauma.
To present contexts that enables the identification, examination and transformation of individual and structural impediments to social justice and equity in organizational functioning.

To provide frameworks and contexts for identifying and examining the intersections between social identity and power, and facilitate the examination of decision making and micro and macro aggression within organizations to increase organizational capacity.