UofG to host inaugural Racial Justice Lecture

The University will welcome Professor Patricia Hill Collins, from the University of Maryland, to give our inaugural Racial Justice Lecture, on 14 October.

This is the first event in a new series which has been established through the University’s Understanding Racism, Transforming University Cultures (URTUC) programme. URTUC aims to address structural racial inequalities faced by our community and publicly states our commitment to being an anti-racist institution.

The title for Professor Collins’s lecture is ‘Black Youth, Violence and Political Activism’, and will be held in the James McCune Smith Learning Hub Room 438, Monday 14 October, 19:00-20:00.

Professor Collins will be introduced by the Principal, Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, and the event is open to staff, students and members of the public.

Professor Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emerita of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her books include Black Feminist Thought (1990, 2000, 2022); Fighting Words (1998); Black Sexual Politics (2004); From Black Power to Hip Hop (2005); Intersectionality (2016; 2020, co-authored with Sirma Bilge); Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019), and Lethal Intersections: Race, Gender, and Violence (2024). Her anthology Race, Class, and Gender: Intersections and Inequalities, 11th ed. (2024), edited with Margaret Andersen, has been widely used for over 30 years in over 200 colleges and universities.

Her books and articles have been translated into Portuguese, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Romanian, French, Spanish and Turkish. Professor Collins has held editorial positions with professional journals, lectured widely in the United States and internationally, served in many capacities in professional organizations, and has acted as consultant for community organizations. In 2008, she became the 100th President of the American Sociological Association, the first African American woman elected to this position in the organization’s 104-year history.

In 2022, she was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, an award given annually to an individual whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.

Understanding Racism Transforming University Cultures

In 2018, the University published a report on our links to the historic slave trade via gifts and bequests received from people whose wealth was derived wholly, or in part, from slavery. This report set out a significant programme of reparative justice for the University and created a platform for sector-wide change and international debate. As part of this programme we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of the West Indies and we have been robustly evaluating how we create meaningful relationships with our global partners, based on equity and respect.

Over the last six years, the University has undertaken both world-leading and sector-leading work to acknowledge our past, decolonise our curriculum and Hunterian Museum, make reparations and commit to diversity, equality, inclusion and belonging within our community. A crucial plank of this programme has been our Understanding Racism Transforming University Culture Report and action plan, published in 2021, which aims to address structural racial inequalities faced by our community and publicly states our commitment to being an anti-racist institution.

A key element of the action plan is to enhance public understanding of the significance of racism and racial justice in the making of modern societies, including the UK. To that end, we have made a commitment to arrange a racial justice lecture series that would be aimed at a broader informed public, as well as staff and students, many of whom come from increasingly diverse cultural backgrounds.

 

First published: 10 October 2024

<< Stories