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The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations
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.
352 pages, Paperback
First published November 19, 2012
21 people are currently reading
994 people want to read
About the author
José Medina
78 books10 followersJosé Medina is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern 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).
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 24, 2026
(2.75) i’ve been meaning to finish this for forever, the first time i only made it past the intro and put it down for two years. i picked it up again for a directed reading and was explaining this to my advisor… he pretty much said, “yeah, it’s dense.” i found this to be very repetitive, and i also found that medina has a thing for coming with “new terms” for things that sound almost exactly like what he is trying to differentiate his new term or concept from. also, he’s going to hit you over the head with pluralism, and normally i like that but this time it annoyed me. oh well!!! at least i can get on with my thesis now lol. also, i was tricked… i thought it would talk a lot more about protests than it actually did!
June 9, 2020
What I really admired about this work is that it provides a functional and normative prescription for how we can achieve epistemological lucidity. I will say that the beginning is a bit slow, but it builds significantly and by the final chapter it flies through concepts that, if you hadn't read the preceding chapters, could really swamp the reader. Rather than try to write a tl;dr of the theory though, I would just like to say that it has given me a lot to consider in my own epistemologically situated subjectivity and how I intend to incorporate my own conformist/privileged (note: these are only derogatory terms if you are already predisposed to resist them) standpoint. I greatly appreciated how the final chapter explored creating heterogeneous rather than homogenous pluralities, and will be something for me to meditate upon for some time.
July 11, 2023
So I started this book and the beginning was so exciting, until it wasn't for 3/4ths of the book and then it was exciting again! This is probably because the epistemology Medina develops has an analytic side for the most part seemingly. No wonder all the novelty was lost. It continues after Miranda Fricker as well, and I didn't like her book, which it expands on even. Unlike in Miranda Fricker's work though Foucault is quite relevant and not dismissed early on, alongside Wittgenstein, and the author takes from multiple feminist theories, theories of democracy, queer and critical race theory, yadda yadda.
So lemme try to explain what the good parts were though:
Focusing on democratic culture, Jose Medina points out how consensus is one of the main epistemic features of democratic participation, but that it does not necessarily account for diversity (epistemic success doesn't depend on epistemic diversity), interaction (Talking really, otherwise voting would be representing private interest), nor dynamism (allowing for fallibility and learning), and can fairly be the opposite of all those things while technically being democratic (Elizabeth Anderson's critique of consensus models of democracy are pretty interesting). To oppose this Medina brings the resistance model, which is basically John Dewey's model, experimentalism. This encompasses literally all those three things, and it does so by giving dissent centre stage. The rationale for the three comes by making use of productive disagreement, the product of the knowledge and experience different people have and them interacting for the best policies, and revisiting already existing ones.
A relevant point is that this approach is unidealistic in three ways, it is particularistic, fallibalistic, and melioristic, which is great because abstractions often have little base in reality and certain assumptions we make when we make them (ideally just society say) contains certain blind spots that is more unhelpful than not considering experiences of people.
On this theoretical model, there is never final and absolute proof of the correctness of our norms, for our norms can only be backed up by how they impact the actual experiences of those affected by them. This experimentalist approach does not dispense with ideals, but ideals here are conceived differently: not as ahistorical standards of assessment for any society, but as imagined solutions for particular problems, or as hypotheses. If our hypothetical ideals pass experiential tests, they are not validated once and for all—outside of history, as it were—for, as Anderson puts it, “Circumstances change, and new problems and complaints arise, requiring the construction of new ideals”
Contrapoints once mentioned that perhaps a better way to identify bigotry in yourself or others is the feeling of being threatened, which would fit in the context of thinking of resistance existing even in the entrails of privilege and, as Medina put it, thought of contending with something instead of exclusively contending against; perplexity as the experience of resistance instead of opposition of two specific forces. Resistance is an obligation for everyone, and not only the oppressed is one of the messages of this book.
Other points I dont feel like integrating:
- Ignorance of social realities often includes a lack of self knowledge (so for example a white racist not knowing how whiteness fits into the cogs)
- Unlike those views that base solidarity on sharing an identity, a set of properties, or a perspective, network solidarity is not achieved at the expense of differences, but rather, through relations that preserve differences, that is, through the construction of networks of heterogeneous elements.
And the rest of the pages, most of the book, were a complete disappointment.
So lemme try to explain what the good parts were though:
Focusing on democratic culture, Jose Medina points out how consensus is one of the main epistemic features of democratic participation, but that it does not necessarily account for diversity (epistemic success doesn't depend on epistemic diversity), interaction (Talking really, otherwise voting would be representing private interest), nor dynamism (allowing for fallibility and learning), and can fairly be the opposite of all those things while technically being democratic (Elizabeth Anderson's critique of consensus models of democracy are pretty interesting). To oppose this Medina brings the resistance model, which is basically John Dewey's model, experimentalism. This encompasses literally all those three things, and it does so by giving dissent centre stage. The rationale for the three comes by making use of productive disagreement, the product of the knowledge and experience different people have and them interacting for the best policies, and revisiting already existing ones.
A relevant point is that this approach is unidealistic in three ways, it is particularistic, fallibalistic, and melioristic, which is great because abstractions often have little base in reality and certain assumptions we make when we make them (ideally just society say) contains certain blind spots that is more unhelpful than not considering experiences of people.
On this theoretical model, there is never final and absolute proof of the correctness of our norms, for our norms can only be backed up by how they impact the actual experiences of those affected by them. This experimentalist approach does not dispense with ideals, but ideals here are conceived differently: not as ahistorical standards of assessment for any society, but as imagined solutions for particular problems, or as hypotheses. If our hypothetical ideals pass experiential tests, they are not validated once and for all—outside of history, as it were—for, as Anderson puts it, “Circumstances change, and new problems and complaints arise, requiring the construction of new ideals”
Contrapoints once mentioned that perhaps a better way to identify bigotry in yourself or others is the feeling of being threatened, which would fit in the context of thinking of resistance existing even in the entrails of privilege and, as Medina put it, thought of contending with something instead of exclusively contending against; perplexity as the experience of resistance instead of opposition of two specific forces. Resistance is an obligation for everyone, and not only the oppressed is one of the messages of this book.
Other points I dont feel like integrating:
- Ignorance of social realities often includes a lack of self knowledge (so for example a white racist not knowing how whiteness fits into the cogs)
- Unlike those views that base solidarity on sharing an identity, a set of properties, or a perspective, network solidarity is not achieved at the expense of differences, but rather, through relations that preserve differences, that is, through the construction of networks of heterogeneous elements.
And the rest of the pages, most of the book, were a complete disappointment.
February 14, 2019
A necessary book that offers a systematic analysis of ignorance, blindness, and injustice as an epistemic phenomena. Medina especially gears his argument toward the political which I rather liked, except it creates some problems, namely, how can you prosecute ignorance? In the end, Medina leaves more questions than answers.
Want to read
September 17, 2020Regarded as a founder of the field of epistemic injustice, Medina was nonetheless criticised by his peers for approaching every kind of social injustice - to the exclusion of economic injustice. The word capitalism does not once appear in this book.
May 28, 2023
hate that I loved this. annoyingly repetitive and pedagogical, but brilliantly pragmatist (booh).
September 18, 2024
Incredible work. Illuminating and inspiring.
December 21, 2024
didn’t actually read the whole thing but I got the concept
Pretty interesting
Pretty interesting
June 7, 2023
While I don't typically list work-related/academic books here, this one deserves to mention. It might be a complex philosophical book for beginners, but it's worth a shot if you're interested in social epistemology, feminist epistemology, critical race theory, and ignorance studies.
Jose Medina looks at the phenomenon of epistemic oppression caused by privileged subjects. It starts from the epistemic vices of the intellectuals, including epistemic arrogance, closed-mindedness, and epistemic laziness. These epistemic vices, Medina argues, create blind-spots for privileged subject so that they unwittingly fall into what he calls active ignorance. He suggests, by overcoming active ignorance, privileged subjects could reach the state of meta-lucidity, so they contribute to a more inclusive epistemology.
Jose Medina looks at the phenomenon of epistemic oppression caused by privileged subjects. It starts from the epistemic vices of the intellectuals, including epistemic arrogance, closed-mindedness, and epistemic laziness. These epistemic vices, Medina argues, create blind-spots for privileged subject so that they unwittingly fall into what he calls active ignorance. He suggests, by overcoming active ignorance, privileged subjects could reach the state of meta-lucidity, so they contribute to a more inclusive epistemology.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews