Dominant ideologies facilitate complicity with and toleration of injustice by controlling the ways in which people think and feel about social realities so that they become unable to register instances of injustices at all or, alternatively, they become numbed to their presence and willing to tolerate them. The production of this kind of active ignorance and insensitivity results from what we can call the colonization of the mind.
How can the mind be decolonized? How do we resist the colonization of the mind and the social insensitivity to injustice that it promotes? This is one of the key challenges of resistance struggles, namely, how to awaken a critical consciousness and sensitivity with respect to injustices. This is what has traditionally been called consciousness-raising in grassroot social movements. In this talk, José Medina (Northwestern University) will be discussing how we have a lot to learn from these social movements and will focus on the kinds of activism that are involved in consciousness-raising.