Description: Patricia Hill-Collins, sociologist and award-winning author will present this year's Hazel I. Jackson Lecture on March 27. This event will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Lehr Room, Bolger Conference Center, Gordinier Hall.

Speaker Biography: Perhaps best known for award-winning Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins outlined American Black feminism expressed in music, fiction, poetry and oral history. Collins saw three themes: Oppressions are interconnected; black women create alternative worldviews for self-definition and self-determination; and black women have often internalized imposed restricting definitions of who they are--especially racialized concepts of beauty, skin color and physique. Collins points to areas that have been overlooked: Racialized gender roles within family and work, politics, violence-in the home, on the job and in the street-and homophobia.

Collins asserts the both/and analysis and an ethics of care could transform the ways in which we think about knowledge claims. Her work has made Afrocentric and feminist thought more accountable, broader in scope and more radical. She forces her readers to think differently and to reexamine the way in which truth and knowledge are produced, reproduced and validated--or eradicated and obscured.

Ticket Information: This event is free and open to the public.

This event is sponsored by the NAACP College Chapter at Millersville University, Black Student Union at Millersville University, Office of the President and the University Theme Committee.