The Epistemology of Resistance Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations

by Medina, José

• ISBN13: 9780199929023
• ISBN10: 0199929025
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-19
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways-from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.

Author Biography

José Medina is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He works primarily in Gender & Race Theory, Philosophy of Language, and Social Epistemology. His writings on language and identity have focused on gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Medina's books include Speaking from Elsewhere (SUNY Press, 2006) and Language (Continuum, 2005).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword: Insensitivity and Blindness
Introduction. Resistance, Democratic Sensibilities, and the Cultivation of Perplexity
A. The Importance of Dissent and the Imperative of Epistemic Interaction
B. Resistance, Perplexity, and Multiperspectivalism
C. Overview

Chapter 1. Active Ignorance, Epistemic Others, and Epistemic Friction
1.1. Active Ignorance and the Epistemic Vices of the Privileged
1.2. Lucidity and the Epistemic Virtues of the Oppressed
1.3. Resistance, Epistemic Responsibility, and the Regulative Principles of Epistemic Friction

Chapter 2. Resistance as Epistemic Vice and as Epistemic Virtue
2.1. The Excess of Epistemic Authority and the Resulting Insensitivity
2.1.1. Epistemic Justice as Interactive, Comparative and Contrastive
2.1.2. Differential Authority, Systematic Injustice, and the Social Imaginary
2.2. The Vice of Avoiding Epistemic Friction, Hermeneuticalal Injustice, and the Problem of Meta-Blindness.
2.3. Striving for Open-Mindedness: Epistemic Friction and Epistemic Counterpoints as Correctives of Meta-Blindness

Chapter 3. Imposed Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities
3.1. Silences and the Communicative Approach to Epistemic Injustice
3.2. Communicative Pluralism and Hermeneutical Injustice
3.3. Our Hermeneutical Responsibilities with respect to Multiple Publics

Chapter 4. Epistemic Responsibility and Culpable Ignorance
4.1. Responsible Agency, Knowledge/Ignorance, and Social Injustice
4.2. Betraying One's Responsibilities under Conditions of Oppression: Social Contextuality, Interconnectedness, and Culpable Ignorance
4.2.A. Pig Heads, Burning Crosses, and Car keys
4.2.B. The Social Division of Cognitive Laziness
4.2.C. Blindness to Differences
4.2.D. Blindness to Social Relationality and the Relevance Dilemma
4.3. Overlapping Insensitivities, Culture-Blaming, and Gender Violence against Third-World Women

Chapter 5. Meta-Lucidity, Epistemic Heroes, and the Everyday Struggle Toward Epistemic Justice
5.1. Living Up to One's Responsibilities under Conditions of Oppression: Meta-Lucidity
5.2. Promoting Lucidity and Social Change
5.3. Echoing: Chained Action, "Epistemic Heroes", and Social Networks
5.3.1. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Epistemic Courage, Critical Imagination and Epistemic Friction
5.3.2. Rosa Parks: Counter-Performativity, Chained Agency, and Social Networks

Chapter 6. Resistant Imagination and Radical Solidarity
6.1. Pluralistic Communities of Resistence
6.2. Normative Pluralism and Radical Solidarity
6.3. Epistemic Friction and Insurrectionary Genealogies
6.4. Guerrilla Pluralism, Counter-Memories, and Epistemologies of Ignorance
6.5. Resistant Imaginations: Toward a Kaleidoscopic Social Sensibility
6.6. Conclusion: Network Solidarity

Coda
References