KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
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).
My research interests focus on the intersection of Epistemology and Social and Political Philosophy. In particular I am interested in questions of knowledge and identity in light of differences in social position. My work draws on feminist and critical race theorists, both analytic and continental. In addition I work on and in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein insofar as he sought to avoid both foundationalist and relativist tendencies in philosophizing.
Representative Publications
- “Epistemology and Resistance” Social Philosophy Today, vol 30 forthcoming.
- “On Subjects, Objects, and Others.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective3, no. 6 (2014): 44-50.
- “Discerning the primary epistemic harm in cases of testimonial injustice” Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy doi: 10.1080/02691728.2013.782581 (2013)
- “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27 issue 4 (2012): 715-735.
- “Wrongful Requests and Strategic Refusals to Understand” in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge Heidi Grasswick, New York: Springer (2011): 223-240.
