The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations [Paperback]

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.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.AcknowledgementsForeword: Insensitivity and BlindnessIntroduction. Resistance, Democratic Sensibilities, and the Cultivation of PerplexityA. The Importance of Dissent and the Imperative of Epistemic InteractionB. Resistance, Perplexity, and MultiperspectivalismC. Overview1. Active Ignorance, Epistemic Others, and Epistemic Friction1.1. Active Ignorance and the Epistemic Vices of the Privileged1.2. Lucidity and the Epistemic Virtues of the Oppressed1.3. Resistance, Epistemic RlsÓ