Problematization is a process of stripping away common or conventional understandings of a subject matter in order to gain new insights.
[1] What may make problematization different from other forms of criticism is its target, the context and details, rather than the pro or con of an argument.
More importantly, this criticism does not take place within the original context or argument, but draws back from it, re-evaluates it, leading to action which changes the situation.
As a form of analysis, problematization seeks to answer the questions of “how and why certain things (behavior; phenomena, processes) became a problem”.
[4] The history of thought refers to an inquiry of what it is, in a given society and epoch, “what allows one to take a step back from his way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions and its goals”.
[4] Crucially, then, Foucault implies that our way of reflecting upon ourselves as individuals, as political bodies, as scientific disciplines or other, has a history and, consequently, imposes specific (rather than universal or a priori) structures upon thought.
[4] This sets Foucauldian problematization apart from many other approaches in that it invites researchers to view opposing scientific theories or political views, and indeed contradictory enunciations in general [7] as responses to the same problematization rather than as the manifestations of mutually excluding discourses.
In Literary Criticism, An Autopsy Mark Bauerlein writes: The act of problematizing has obvious rhetorical uses.
Instead of being a familiar predicate in scholarship, one readers casually assimilate without much notice, "classic" now stands out from the flow of discourse.
This is another advantage of the term "problematize": it is a simple procedure, but it sounds like an incisive investigative pursuit.