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Protest is urgently important to democracy. Here philosopher José Medina explains why it is so essential and explores the unfair obstacles and challenges that protest movements can face. Medina underscores how challenging it can be for protesting voices to be heard under conditions of oppression, and proposes ways in which the silencing of protest can be fought. Democracies are obligated to listen to protest and even to join protesting voices when grave injustices are in the public eye.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I: Protest as a Matrix of Communicative Resistance
- Chapter 1. Toward a Radical Epistemology of Protest
- 1.1. Protest as Democratic Communicative Resistance
- 1.2. Our Duties to Protest and to Listen to Protest: Expressive Harms and Communicative Resistance
- 1.3. Managing the Duty to Protest and to Give Proper Uptake to Protest
- 1.4. Uncivil Protest, Civil Death, and Liberation Movements
- Chapter 2. No Justice, No Peace: Uncivil Protest and the Politics of Confrontation
- 2.1. Social Spaces without Political Resistance? Stifling Dissent and the Difficulties of Protests in Sports
- 2.2. Arguments for Protesting Injustice: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
- 2.3. Toward a Politics of Confrontation: Uncivil Direct Actions and Counter-protests
- Chapter 3. Silencing and Protest
- 3.1. Protest as Complex Communication that Demands Uptake
- 3.1.a. Expressive and Speech Acts within the Matrix of Communicative Resistance
- 3.1.b. Felicity Conditions and Proper Recognition of the Complex Illocution of Protest
- 3.2. Defective Uptake and Different Kinds of Silencing
- 3.3. Proper Uptake and Echoing
- 3.4. The Road Ahead: Radical Agency and the Four Communicative Dimensions of Protest
- Part II: Forging Communicative Solidarity and Re-Making the Polis: Changing Ourselves and Changing the World through Protest
- Chapter 4. Whose Streets? Our Streets! The Making of a Protesting Public
- 4.1. Standing Together and (Re-)Shaping the Polis: The Group-Constituting Power of Protest
- 4.2. Protest as a Complex Matrix of Interpellation: The Performative Power of Protest
- 4.3. Group Silencing, Epistemic Activism and the Constitutive Polyphony of Protest
- Coda: You are so vain so think that this protest is about you, don't you?
- Chapter 5. Radical Testimony: Resisting Communicative and Epistemic Injustice through Protest
- 5.1. Silencing and Downgrading of testimonial protest acts
- 5.1.a. Communicative Injustice: Kinds of Silencing of Testimonial Protest Acts
- 5.1.b. Epistemic Injustice: Kinds of Epistemic Downgrading of Testimonial Protest Acts
- A. Group Testimonial Injustice
- B. Group Hermeneutical Injustice
- C. Agential Epistemic Injustice
- 5.2. Radical Testimony
- 5.2.a. My Body as a Witness
- Hands Up, Don't Shoot
- The Die-Ins of ACT UP and BLM
- 5.2.b. Our Suffering has No Name: Look at This!
- Documentary and Testimonial Images in the Anti-Lynching Movement
- Counter-Images and Image-Based Online Activism
- 5.2.c. Our Suffering has No Name, and yet We Won't be Silent: I Can't Breathe!
- (On How Protesting Voices Echo the Silenced and Smothered Voices of their Brothers and Sisters with New and Old Language)
- Chapter 6. Protest as Critique: Emotional Expressivity and Critical Discourses
- 6.1. Emotions and Social Criticism
- 6.2. Conventional Emotions and Meliorative Critique in Protest Movements
- 6.3. Outlaw Emotions and Radical Critique in Protest Movements
- Coda: White Rage (or "Wonderland is not for everyone!")
- Chapter 7. Protest as a Source of Demands: Polyphony and the Radical Imagination of Liberation Movements
- 7.1. Different Kinds of Demands and the Communicative Injustices They Face
- 7.2. The Radical Imagination: Radical Demands and Communicative Obligations to Listen to Them
- References
- Index
About the author
José Medina is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He previously taught at Vanderbilt University and has held visiting appointments at Carlos III University, Princeton University, and University of Johannesburg. His first three books were on Wittgenstein and theories of meaning, identity, and agency. His fourth book, The Epistemology of Resistance is winner of the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award.
