Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "This is an immensely important book for our times. Medina provides new critical analyses of how dissent can be silenced and subtly disarmed in ways that escape the charge of censorship. He explores how protests challenge standard ideas about both knowledge and communication. And he also demonstrates, more hopefully, how social movements transform public spheres in a productive manner that outlives the current moment." -- Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York
"Medina offers a theoretically nuanced and empirically rich account of protest as 'communicative resistance' that can produce new varieties of collective learning and public inquiry. He argues that we have both a duty to protest injustice and a duty to listen actively to others' protests against injustice-even when their protests seem to be 'uncivil.' He shows that the duty to take resistance to injustice seriously is among the most important democratic responsibilities that we have." -- Michele Moody-Adams, author of Making Space for Justice"The Epistemology of Protest fortifies José Medina's position as one of our most influential thinkers in the field of epistemic justice. Medina brilliantly applies his groundbreaking work on epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance to street activism and protest movements. At a time when democratic ideals are threatened by reactionary white supremacist movements, this book promises to provide a much-needed path to effective liberatory activism." -- Nancy Tuana, author of Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference"Medina's book is an important contribution to the tasks of clarifying and resisting the challenges to protest, especially those in service of progressive and liberatory goals. It is, above all, a timely book." -- Chong-Ming Lim, Ethics"The Epistemology of Protest presents a comprehensive and nuanced investigation, especially regarding the various forms of silencing and epistemic injustice that protests often encounter. Medina's thorough defense of uncivil protest, combined with a focus on the internal life of protest and our normative obligations toward protest, offers a significant, provocative shift in the discourse surrounding protest." -- Catharine Saint-Croix, Criminal Law and Philosophy