In 2017, we were excited to welcome Dr. Patricia Hill Collins to campus for our 3rd annual symposium. Dr. Collins is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland. She is also the Charles Phelps Taft Emeritus Professor of Sociology within the Department of African American Studies here at the University of Cincinnati.

Dr. Collins is a social theorist whose research and scholarship have examined issues of race, gender, social class, sexuality and/or nation. Her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge), published in 1990, with a revised tenth year anniversary edition published in 2000, won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for significant scholarship in gender, and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second book, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, 8th ed. (2013), edited with Margaret Andersen, is widely used in undergraduate classrooms in over 200 colleges and universities. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (Routledge, 2004) received ASA’s 2007 Distinguished Publication Award.

Professor Collins’s current research interests lie in the following sociology of knowledge projects: (1) the epistemology of intersectionality, specifically, analyzing how race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation and/or age mutually construct one another as systems of power and as theoretical constructs; (3) exploring epistemologies of emancipatory knowledges, for example, critical race theory, nationalism and feminism; and (3) examining how African American male and female youth’s experiences with social issues of education, unemployment, popular culture and political activism articulate with global phenomena, specifically, complex social inequalities, global capitalist development, transnationalism, and political activism.