Problematising, critical thinking, and round manhole covers

A biography of Pope.L said he 'problematised' race, work, and sex. I wondered what that actually meant so I looked it up and it's really interesting! 

I assumed it meant effectively to make complaint about... It's funny how the word 'problem' has so many negative connotations nowadays, especially in business. Making something a problem is seen as complaining about something trivial. Actually, I guess it literally means to formulate something in a way that it can be solved.

From my understanding, to 'problematise' something is a critical thinking technique whereby you take something 'commonly understood' and reframe it as a problem to be solved, to effectively question it from scratch. E.g. I could problematise cat ownership (my cat just jumped on the bed) by starting to ask questions like "why do we have cats?" "who owns who?" "do cats want to live with humans?" "who gets to decide who can have a cat, and why?" "why cats, why not other animals?" etc etc A way to approach is, according to Wikipedia, is to put quotes around the thing you want to explore e.g. Picasso was a great artist -> Picasso was a 'great artist'. The questions start to pour in....

I am really interested in critical thinking - I feel like it's something I've often done (people compliment and complain about my 'questioning everything'). Interestingly, I think it's what we tested for in Google with the "General Cognitive Ability" interviews that I always seemed to get lumbered with - those funny interviews that the press loved to report on - the aim of them wasn't actually to see if candidates knew why manhole covers were round, but rather to see how candidates approached problem solving, especially assumptions. Actually problematising was encouraged at Google, especially in the heady post-IPO times when I joined - often with amazing results ("How do I delete back-up tapes I can't access" - hint, what does 'delete' actually MEAN here) and sometimes less amazing results ("Why are email, chat, and documents all separate things?")