ABSTRACT
Patricia Hill Collins is one of the foremost black feminist scholars in the world. In the first edition of this Reader, an extract from her book, Black Feminist Thought, was chosen as a way into thinking more about oppression and social justice. This time we have selected her article on intersectionality, in which she engages with the dilemma that although we think that we will ‘know’ intersectionality when we see it, we often cannot define what it is. This ‘definitional dilemma’ means that we either define it so narrowly that it reflects the interests of only one segment or so broadly that its very popularity causes it to lose its meaning. Hill Collins identifies that practitioners (including social workers) conceptualise intersectionality in dramatically different ways and argues that this matters. We begin with the ‘commonly accepted general contours of intersectionality’, before turning to the outline of the three ‘interdependent sets of concerns that characterize intersectionality as a broad-based knowledge project: (a) intersectionality as a field of study; (b) intersectionality as an analytical strategy; and (c) intersectionality as critical praxis.
