SXU hosts John Ziegler Memorial Lecture Series

Saint Xavier University's (SXU) Philosophy and Religion Studies Department will host its John Ziegler Memorial Lecture Series event on Thursday, February 15 at 7 p.m. in McGuire Hall. This event entitled, "Taking Responsibility for Racial Violence" will be presented by Dr. Jose Medina, the Walter Dill Scott professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Patterns of racial violence have a systemic social dimension that requires going beyond the individual responsibilities of perpetrators of such violence. Analyzing different kinds of complicity with racial violence and defending a view of shared responsibility, Dr. Medina will argue for a kind of political mobilization and resistance against racial violence that he terms epistemic activism, which consists in contestatory practices that disrupt complicity with the distortions in social perception that hide patterns of racial violence and perpetuate the vulnerabilities of racial minorities. Epistemic activism will be discussed by analyzing photo activism and the activist practices of organizations such as the NAACP and of social movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Dr. Medina works in critical race theory, gender/queer theory and political philosophy. His latest book is "The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations" (Oxford University Press).

To learn more about Dr. Medina and the upcoming lecture, contact Dr. Forrest Perry at perryFREESXU or visit the Lecture Series web page.

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