Patricia Hill Collins is a key figure in critical sociology as well as feminism and Black feminist thought. Since the 1980s, her writings have transformed social theory, raising questions such as, “Who can be a knower?” “Whose knowledge counts?” and “What counts as theory?” Importantly, Collins invites theorists and practitioners to rethink the intersections of race, gender, class, and other social dimensions as they pertain to the historical and contemporary lives of African Americans in U.S. society. Her work is vast and examines a range of topics from pragmatism to pedagogy. Collins’s theorizing about race, class, and gender has become part of social science literacy. Her analyses of intersectionality provide great explanatory power in both empirical and conceptual methods across fields of inquiry.
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Feminism