Patricia Hill Collins, "Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory" (Duke UP, 2019)
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What is intersectionality and why consider it a critical social theory?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tayson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. And I'm co-host of the channel along with Carrie Figdoor, Robert Talice, and Alexis McLeod. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Patricia Hill Collins, distinguished professor emerita of sociology at the University of Maryland College Park. Her book, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, is just out from Duke University Press. Is intersectionality a critical social theory? What must intersectionality do to be both critical and a social theory?
Does it have to have social justice as a guiding normative principle? And what does or should social justice mean in intersectional th theory? Patricia Hill Collins explores these questions and many more in Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, engaging a wide range of thinkers, activists, and traditions, including classical American pragmatism, the Frankfurt School. And the work of Ida B. Wells Barnett. Collins helps us to reconsider how we think of intersectionality's history in order to shape its future. Uh good morning, Patricia L. Collins. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thank you. Um so we like to start out by uh hearing a bit about your background and who you are as a theorist and your interests and how you came to write this book.
I came to write this particular book through the catalyst of a graduate course I was teaching in intersectionality at the University of Maryland. I have been working in the field of intersectionality for quite some time, or I have been working with the ideas that have c uh come to be known as intersectionality for some time. And what I wanted to do was to offer a course that would help me synthesize the ideas that I'd been working with. Now what was interesting about this particular course was when I looked to put it together. and examine the emerging themes of intersectionality or the literature on intersectionality, I was not happy with what I was finding. My experience of intersectionality did not necessarily match up with the discourse that seemed to be emerging that I could use in a course on social theory.
So a word about my experiences, because they really do lead to this particular book. For one, I had written this book in that was published in nineteen ninety, titled Black Feminist Thought, that is still in print. Uh proudly in print, to be honest with you, that introduces the ideas of intersectionality without using the term intersectionality per se. It was originally published in nineteen ninety, and by the time I revised it in two thousand, I incorporated the idea of intersectionality because the ideas had been named as such by then. I was talking about a matrix of domination in nineteen ninety because I was much more closely aligned with the ideas of social movements that preceded this particular idea.
I had also prior to putting together my course at the University of Maryland worked through Uh several editions with my uh my colleague Margaret Anderson of a book titled Race, Class, Gender and Anthology. And what we were doing was we were mapping the emergence of what came to be known as the field of intersectionality in real time. We were pulling ideas from so many different people and putting their work in an anthology, which we realized every three years we had to update because the ideas of intersectionality, as we now call them, were emerging then. And this work was coming out of the fifties, the sixties, the seventies. This was mid twentieth century work that followed World War Two and the globalization that we are so comfortable with today.
So working through that project in real time and recognizing that the race, class, gender studies was in fact moving toward intersectionality was a way to keep my uh feet on the ground around social movements and also around ideas as they manifest themselves to us in the academy.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is intersectionality and why consider it a critical social theory?
0:00–8:48
2
How did Patricia Hill Collins’s personal and academic background shape the book?
8:48–16:35
3
What motivated the creation of the graduate course that led to the book?
16:35–24:50
4
Which gaps did Collins identify in existing intersectionality literature?
24:50–32:10
5
How does Collins define “critical” within intersectionality as a social theory?
32:10–40:37
6
What role does dialogical methodology play in developing intersectional knowledge?
40:37–48:07
7
Which future projects does Collins envision to extend intersectional research?
48:07–55:45
8
How can intersectionality inform social‑justice and emancipatory knowledge?
55:45–1:02:51
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