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As thinkers and practitioners, Bonnie Thornton Dill and Ruth E. Zambrana have been actively engaged in nurturing intersectionality since its inception. For Dill and Zambrana, intersectionality constitutes “an innovative and emerging field of study that provides a critical analytic lens to interrogate racial, ethnic , class, ability, age, sexuality, and gender disparities and to contest existing ways of looking at these structures of inequality, transforming knowledges as well as the social institutions in which they have found themselves.” This expansive definition, one that links knowledge and power, research and policy, the individual and the collective, captures the spirit of intersectionality as it unfolded in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Unlike scholarly dilettantes who perpetually chase scholarly fads, Dill and Zambrana have been patiently, and some would say heroically, laboring for several decades to develop our understanding of intersectionality as a critical analytic lens that serves social justice. Emerging Intersections encompasses one important project that reflects the larger corpus of their work. Despite the widespread belief that intersectionality has arrived, I think that it is important to stop and recognize that this way of looking at and living within the world constitutes a new area of inquiry that is still in its infancy. Moreover, because this field remains both staunchly interdisciplinary and committed to claiming the much-neglected space of praxis (one where transforming ideas and institutions inform one another), from its inception intersectionality set a seemingly impossible high bar for itself. Given its high initial aspirations and the way they have played out, Emerging Intersections can serve as an important guidepost to mark the trajectory of intersectional scholarship and practice. This volume can help us look backward in order to interrogate past ideals and practices as well as forward in order to imagine potential directions and future vii FOREWORD Emerging Intersections—Building Knowledge and Transforming Institutions PATRICIA HILL COLLINS achievements. In short, the volume raises three core questions. What have we learned from the early decades of the field of intersectionality? Given its past, what directions might this field that is still in its infancy now take? Furthermore how might practitioners who are doing intersectional scholarship and/or activism continue to move the field forward? As to the first core question, what might Emerging Intersections tell us about past practices of intersectional inquiry? In the greatly changed political and intellectual context of the early twenty-first century, revisiting and clarifying the initial impetus and vision that accompanied this critical analytic lens of intersectionality becomes especially prescient. We need to remember that such a wide range of scholar/activists developed various aspects of this approach through the s and s that, when Kimberlé Crenshaw penned the term “intersectionality” in , she basically named a heterogeneous set of practices that had gone on for some time (Crenshaw, ). She argued, quite convincingly, that understandings of violence against women would be limited unless one took into consideration the race, ethnicity, immigrant status , and class of women who were targets of violence. Crenshaw pointed out how programs that were developed via gender-only frameworks were narrow at best, and deeply flawed at worst, because they failed to take into consideration how intersecting power relations of race, class, immigrant status, and gender affected women’s options. More importantly, Crenshaw saw knowledge and hierarchical power relations as co-constituted—the very frameworks that shaped understandings of violence against women simultaneously influenced both the violence itself as well as organizational responses to it. In this regard, social institutions were limited if they did not take intersectional analyses into account. Crenshaw was not alone in calling for intersectional analyses of social problems and the knowledge/power relations that catalyzed them. As discussed in Dill and Zambrana’s introduction to this volume, many thinkers and activists set out to transform a host of institutional practices and knowledges via a newfound and seemingly expansive framework of intersectionality. From its inception, intersectionality took up the social problems that most affected those most harmed by inequalities—poverty, poor education, substandard healthcare, inadequate housing, and violence all became rethought through a lens of intersecting power relations of race, class, and gender. It soon became apparent that it was not enough to use an intersectional framework to understand specific social problems—one could also begin to ask the big questions of how racism and sexism were co-constituted, how class and heterosexism mutually constructed one another, and how citizenship status (nationality) articulated with issues of ability and age. In essence, intersectionality increasingly took on...

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