Resistance Culture as a Remedy for Epistemic Injustice

• In Event: Riot and Resistance: For Good or for Ill

Abstract

This paper will argue that embracing “resistance culture”—in which acts of opposition to status quo power structures are celebrated as part of a healthy public sphere—represents a promising remedy to the epistemic injustice suffered by a society’s most marginalized members. “Resistance” is therefore an important part of a genuinely pluralist society, in which even the disadvantaged can see their ideas and experiences represented in the society’s shared public life. The paper will combine philosophical argument and engagement with real-world cases of resistance (such as Indigenous resistance to the proposed construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border) to demonstrate the useful role it can play in public life.

Proponents of the “all affected” and “all subjected” principles have long recognized the democratic deficit that accrues when states exercise power over certain people—such as Indigenous persons, undocumented immigrants, and asylum-seekers—without allowing them sufficient opportunities for political participation. But people in these positions—consistently subject to state power but effectively excluded from its exercise—don’t only suffer from a lack of democratic representation. They also suffer from epistemic injustice. This is because the very state institutions that subject them to power also work to shape their societies’ commonly accepted ideas about justice and injustice. Major social and political institutions wield what Jennifer Rubenstein calls “discursive power,” which allows them to influence how people understand the concepts (like freedom, fairness, and equality) that in turn influence how they understand what justice requires and what constitutes injustice. Thus, those who are excluded from the political processes that determine how major institutions wield their power are also excluded from an important process by which the concepts needed to understand and evaluate social life are developed. In other words, they suffer what Miranda Fricker calls “hermeneutical marginalization,” which gives rise to hermeneutical injustice.

Resistance offers an avenue through which the victims of this epistemic injustice can make their ideas heard in the public sphere and thereby influence the development of important interpretive concepts, thus overcoming the epistemic injustice with which they are faced. This is an attractive way to remedy the injustice because it centers the agency of oppressed people themselves and because it may function either as a precursor or an alternative to incorporating marginalized people into mainstream political institutions, as the case requires. (For example, Catherine Lu has argued that further incorporating Indigenous people into the major institutions of the settler states occupying their historic lands may not be sufficient to remedy the injustices they suffer, suggesting that such remedies must be sought outside these institutions.) Given this, we should not see the rise of resistance culture as a sign that a society’s political processes have “failed” in some way, but should (at least sometimes) see it as a sign that a society’s marginalized and excluded populations have carved out a space for themselves in its public sphere.

Author

• Lucia M. Rafanelli, George Washington University