Harvard Review of Philosophy Colloquium Lecture: José Medina (Northwestern University), "Resisting Under Conditions of Oppression: Silencing, Protest, and Epistemic Activism"

Resisting under Conditions of Oppression: Silencing, Protest, and Epistemic Activism

Dr. José Medina

Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy

Northwestern University

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss some of the communicative and epistemic challenges that oppressed groups face when they try to resist their oppression. I will focus on stigmatized social groups, such as queer communities, which are subject to targeted social silencing and invisibilization. I argue that, for these communicatively marginalized groups, resisting oppression requires silence-breaking actions, such as the kiss-ins and other visibility actions of queer activism. My analysis will elucidate how stigmatized protesting voices can empower themselves through what I call epistemic activism, that is, through practices of resistance in which oppressed subjects give communicative and epistemic support to each other. I will discuss how social silences are resisted by grassroot liberation movements, and how marginalized subjects use public protest as a mechanism of epistemic self-empowerment. My central claim will be that overcoming the history of silencing and social invisibility of stigmatized groups requires self-empowerment and “a revolution of our sensibility” through epistemic activism.