José Medina
· ChairpersonVerifiedNorthwestern University · Philosophy
Active 1992–2025
About
José Medina is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He works primarily in critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, political philosophy, communication theory, and social epistemology. Medina has published five monographs, five edited or co-edited volumes, and over seventy articles and book chapters. His latest book, The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. His previous notable work includes The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, which received the North-American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award. His current research focuses on how social perception and social imagination contribute to vulnerabilities to various forms of violence and oppression, as well as the social movements and activism—particularly epistemic activism—that can be mobilized to resist racial and sexual violence in both local and global contexts. Medina is also engaged in projects on theories of oppression and resistance, including collections of essays and books on resistance and prefigurative politics.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Law
- Computer Science
- Epistemology
- Philosophy
- Biology
- Media studies
- Ecology
- Food science
Selected publications
transcript Verlag eBooks · 2025-11-19
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingPhilosophie - Aufklärung - Kritik · 2025-11-11
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingLATAM Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades · 2025-12-18
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingEl arbitraje en materia de contrataciones públicas se encuentra consagrado en la Ley N° 32069, Ley General de Contrataciones Públicas. En esta ley se establece un orden de preferencia en la aplicación del derecho. Sin embargo, la coexistencia de principios como la supremacía constitucional, la prevalencia de normas especiales (lex specialis) y la autonomía privada de la libertad (pacta sunt servanda) genera una falta de uniformidad en el criterio sobre la jerarquía en la aplicación normativa. En este contexto, el presente artículo tiene como finalidad determinar cuál es el orden de prelación aplicable al proceso (lex arbitri) y al fondo de la controversia (lex causae) en los arbitrajes institucionales de esta materia. La investigación se desarrolló bajo un enfoque cualitativo y utilizó una metodología dogmática-jurídica, sistémica y hermenéutica, además de la técnica del análisis documental para la descripción, interpretación y proposición de un esquema de relaciones jurídicas jerárquicas. Entre los principales resultados, se evidenció la existencia de dos tipos de jerarquías normativas diferenciadas: procesales y de fondo. Ambas se estructuran en cuatro niveles (constitucional, especiales, generales y complementarias) y se distinguen por sus características en el tipo de observancia o vinculatoriedad (obligatoria, supletoria y facultativa) y el tipo de control jurisdiccional aplicable (control constitucional y ordinario). Se concluye que la distinción de estas categorías puede servir como guía para la actuación arbitral y para fortalecer la predictibilidad en el arbitraje, la uniformidad de criterios y la validez del laudo.
Breaking Silences: Public Kissing and Other Things To Do When Protest <i>Must</i> Be Uncivil
2025-11-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter argues that some forms of targeted social silence and social invisibility stigmatize marginalized groups, and that resisting stigmatizing silence/invisibility of that sort requires uncivil protest. It argues that both principled and strategic arguments against uncivil protests fail when it comes to silence- and invisibility-breaking protests against stigmatizing taboos. The chapter develops the argument about those silence-breaking or invisibility-breaking protests that must be uncivil through a discussion of queer activism. The discussion of necessary uncivil protest in queer activism focuses on sexualized visibility actions, such as those carried out by Queer Nation. My analysis of Queer Nation’s visibility actions shows that, when confronting stigmatizing taboos, protests must be uncivil in order to transform sensibilities through epistemic and affective friction.
Aesthetic Resistance: Reimagining Critical Epistemology and the Grammars of Silence
Social Epistemology · 2024-10-13 · 3 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingContemporary Political Theory · 2023-08-03
article1st author2023-03-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract The Introduction explains why the book focuses on protest under conditions of oppression. It argues against two widespread misconceptions about protest: that protesting is an easy thing to do in Western liberal democracies with formal freedoms of assembly and expression, and that protest has epistemic value only as an instrument of public information and persuasion. Against these assumptions, the Introduction argues (1) that it is not easy for people to come to protest even in democratic societies because it requires a difficult process of critical awakening about experiences of injustice and overcoming communicative and epistemic challenges against speaking up posed by oppressive conditions, and (2) that protesting has intrinsic communicative and epistemic value that goes beyond informing and persuading others and consists in transforming the public sphere by creating new publics and attempting to transform social sensibilities. The introduction also provides a roadmap for the book and a brief synopsis of the seven chapters.
2023-03-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter 6 develops a discussion of the evaluative dimension of protest through an analysis of the political emotions expressed in protest acts. The first section of this chapter explains how emotions contain critical evaluations and I argue that emotional expressivity is crucial for social criticism. The rest of the chapter examines how the critical evaluations expressed in protest are grounded in political emotions and how the emotional expressivity of protest can be elaborated into critical discourses. The chapter draws from Alison Jaggar’s distinction between conventional emotions and outlaw emotions to shed light on the different evaluative attitudes and critical reactions to injustice of protesting publics. The chapter argues that, through linguistic elaboration, the critical evaluations contained in conventional and outlaw emotions lead to two different kinds of critical discourses: meliorative and radical forms of social criticism. The chapter elucidates the distinction between meliorative critique and radical critique through an analysis of queer activism and the critical discourses of the marriage equality movement, ACT UP, and Queer Nation. The guerrilla protest tactics of ACT UP illustrate well how, under conditions of communicative and epistemic injustice, when publics and institutions refuse to listen or are affectively and epistemically ill-equipped to listen properly, aggressive communicative action is needed to break social silences and actively resist insensitivity.
2023-03-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingExtract This book is dedicated to Charles Mills, a philosophical giant who had a deep influence on my thinking about issues of justice and race and with whom I will always be in philosophical conversation about these issues.
2023-03-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter 3 lays out the communicative approach to protest that I use in the rest of the book and lays the groundwork for the expressive and speech-act-theoretic analysis of the different dimensions of protest acts. The chapter provides an analysis of the silencing of protest and distinguishes four different kinds of silencing: pre-locutionary, locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary silencing. The account of silencing sketched in this chapter pays particular attention to those forms of silencing that are produced by defective uptake (or lack of uptake) by the audiences of protest; it is an account that will be further elaborated and complicated in later chapters through case studies. This chapter also offers a preliminary analysis of four different communicative dimensions of protest and the different kinds of silencing they can be subject to, an analysis that is further developed in the four subsequent chapters dedicated to each of the four key communicative dimensions of protest.
Frequent coauthors
- 17 shared
Mariana Ortega
- 16 shared
Ariko Ikehara
Binghamton University
- 16 shared
Mike Gill
Sankara Nethralaya
- 16 shared
Vivian M. May
- 16 shared
Shireen Roshanravan
- 16 shared
Linda Alcoff
California State University System
- 16 shared
Suyapa Portillo
Binghamton University
- 16 shared
Noreen Khawaja
Binghamton University
Awards & honors
- North-American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award
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