José Medina
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Critical Theory Minor; Walter Dill Scott Professor
José works primarily in critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, political philosophy, communication theory and social epistemology. His books include The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford University Press; recipient of the 2013 North-American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award), and Speaking from Elsewhere (SUNY Press, 2006). His most recent co-edited volumes are The Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (Routledge, 2017) and Cosmopolitanism and Place (Indiana University Press, 2017). 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 what he terms “epistemic activism”) that can be mobilized to resist racial and sexual violence and oppression in local and global contexts. Current book projects include Racial Violence and Epistemic Activism and Theories of the Flesh: Latin-American and US Latina Feminist Theories (with Andrea Pitts and Mariana Ortega).
Selected Books
Selected Essays
“Epistemic Injustice and Epistemologies of Ignorance”, in Paul Taylor, Linda M. Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson (eds.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race (Routledge, 1997).
“Pragmatism, Racial Injustice and Epistemic Insurrection: Toward an Insurrectionist Pragmatism”, in Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil (eds.), Pragmatism and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2017).
“The Will Not to Believe: Pragmatism, Oppression, and Standpoint Theory”, in S. Sullivan and E. Tarver (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of William James (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015), pp. 256-289.
“Communicative Democracy and Solidarity Across Racial and Sexual Differences”, in Ulrike Vieten (ed.), Revisiting Iris Marion Young on Normalization, Inclusion and Democracy (Palgrave: 2014), pp. 33-48.
“An Enactivist Approach to the Imagination: Embodied Enactments and ‘Fictional Emotions’”, American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3), (2013), 317-335.
“Color-Blindness, Meta-Ignorance, and the Racial Imagination”, Critical Philosophy of Race 1 (1), (2013), 38-67.
“Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Hermeneutical Responsibilities”, Social Epistemology Vol. 26 (2), (2012), 201-220.
“Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism”, Foucault Studies No. 12, (2011), 9-35.
“Wittgenstein as a Rebel: Dissidence and Contestation in Discursive Practices”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 18 (1) (2010), 1-29.
“Whose meanings? Resignifying Voices and Their Social Locations”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy Vol. 22, No. 2 (2008), 92-105.
“How to Undo Things with Words: Infelicitous Practices and Infelicitous Agents”, Essays in Philosophy Vol. 8, No. 1 (2007), 1-16.
“Tongues Untied: Polyphonic Identities and The Hispanic Family”, Ethnic Studies Review 29 (2006), 1-21.
“Pragmatism and Ethnicity: Critique, Reconstruction, and the New Hispanic”, Metaphilosophy 35 (2004), 115-146
“Identity Trouble: Disidentification and the Problem of Difference”, Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (2004), 655-680.