Intersectionality, Epistemic Oppression and Resistance: An Interview With Patrícia Hill Collins

Abstract

gave the event's lecture entitled "Who Gets to Tell Intersectionality's Story? -On Epistemic Oppression and Resistance." Widely known for her work on critical approaches about race, gender, and sexuality, she generously accepted our request to interview her for this special issue.Patricia Hill Collins is an activist, professor of sociology, and researcher at the University of Maryland, United States. Her well-known research revolves around the debate about race, gender, and sexuality and her speech has much to add and enhance the debate around "Language and Race", proposed in this dossier. Collins starts from her experiences and experiences, her inner voice, in the USA context to problematize, in her intellectual work, how the "intersecting power relations of racism, heteropatriarchy, class exploitation, and nationalism remain dedicated to stamping out the power of a free mind of all those who are harmed by those systems and how these systems epistemically oppress and silence". Considering that this "occurs when you have an internal voice that cannot be heard or when the process of disciplining your inner voice is so total self-censorship of your ideas before you ever think them, leaves our best ideas stillborn".That›s why Collins states, in this interview, that «much of my work has aimed to protect my inner voice -this truth-telling voice that I cultivated as early as daycare and within my neighborhood continues to inform my intellectual activism. Yet much of my work has investigated Black women's collective voice in the context of discriminatory social structures". That is, to understand how social structures act, constrain, oppress, that is, how power is organized and operates (COLLINS; BILGE, 2016;COLLINS, 2009). Collins addresses these issues from a critical point of view of black women as a collectivity and of intersectionality as a heuristic device that shapes a kind of critical investigation and praxis provides a framework for deepening a critical perspective on these multiple systems of oppression BILGE, 2016). For the researcher and activist, "intersectionality at its best is developed in conversations among people who share similar goals concerning equity and social justice that foster their ability to have difficult conversations. Decolonizing voice requires new ways of speaking and listening, both to the voice within ourselves, as well as the kinds of conversations we have with one another".On decolonization, one of the themes of the interview, Collins states that "the process of decolonizing ideas and material practices is organized across the axes of the economic, the political and the cultural". In other words, it is linked to systems of power to undertake such as an analysis, she proposes to dialogue intersectionality and decoloniality as part of a broader project of critical analysis of oppression. Thus, for Collins in this interview, "decoloniality as a process (economic, political and cultural) can be accommodated within each one. Stated differently, intersectionality focuses more on the conne...