Title: Activist Slogans and ‘Reframing the Debate’

Abstract: This talk will examine the role of slogans in social justice movements and how we should understand their meaning. Social justice movements often utilise slogans and claims which putatively clash with received common sense. One way of understanding these claims is as what Cantalamessa terms ‘conceptual activism’: the role of claims like ‘disability pride’ is to challenge and destabilise the hegemonic common sense, for strategic political ends, rather than to be descriptively accurate. On such views, these campaigns have pragmatic political goals rather than epistemic/descriptive goals. I will argue against these views. Drawing on analyses of ideology as both epistemically and politically pernicious, I contend that such campaigns have both political and epistemic aims. I aim to show that this better captures the role of these slogans by attending to historical case studies.