Taking Responsibility for Racial Violence: Shooting the Racist Imagination
José Medina is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University where he teaches critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, political philosophy, and social epistemology. His most recent book is “The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations” (Oxford University Press), which received the 2013 North-American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award. His current projects focus on how social perception and the social imagination contribute to the formation of vulnerabilities to different kinds of violence and oppression. These projects also explore the social movements and kinds of activism (including epistemic activism) that can be mobilized to resist racial and sexual violence and oppression in local and global contexts. In his Athenaeum talk, he will argue for a kind of political mobilization and resistance against racial violence that he terms “epistemic activism.”
Medina received his Ph.D. from Northwestern.