The Prison of Misrecognition: The Epistemic Struggle against “Bad Words” in Philippine Politics

For scholars of the Global South, epistemic struggle happens in the particular, that is, over the course of debates around particular models of reality. To illustrate, I reconstruct debates around an influential model of Philippine politics, arguing that the model is premised on a set of “bad words” and that these bad words have real effects. These bad words produce a prison of misrecognition. Delving into this literature yields a finer-grained picture of epistemic struggle. Specifically, we can discern three kinds of blindnesses: ontological, epistemological, and sociological; two kinds of pain: feeling stuck in a cognitive prison and worse, feeling one deserves to be stuck there; and one kind of agency at stake: not just the capacity for action but also the capacity for subjects to act within the parameters of their own reality.