She discusses the intersectionality of standpoint, which is the idea that different individuals perceive the social reality around them differently based on the social group they belong to. Patricia Hill Collins gained fame through her article, “Learning from the Outsider Within” published in Social Problems in 1986.

Her work has taken her across the globe where she seeks to unravel the connections between race, class, gender, regions and communities. In 2005, she joined as the Wilson Elkins Professor of Sociology in the University of Maryland. In 1996, she became the Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Professor of Sociology and is now Emeritus. Patricia Hill Collins has gained many distinctions over the years. She was also the Chair from 1999 to 2002. In 1982, Collins joined the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati where she taught for the next 23 years. She returned to graduate and received her PhD in Sociology from Brandeis University in 1984. Wright Mills Award from Society for the Study of Social Problems. This became the subject of her first and most famous book, “Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and Politics of Empowerment” (1990) which won the Jessie Bernard Award of American Sociological Association (A P A) and the C. Her earlier study of the sociology of knowledge helped her understand how structures of white male oppression systematically denied representation to black and women voices in the intellectual realm and how this realm was inaccessible to many oppressed classes. It was while teaching a course called ‘ The Black Woman’ to middle school girls in 1970 that Collins realised the dearth of intellectual material on the lives of African-American women and the significance of this dearth. Collins worked as a school teacher and curriculum expert at schools in Boston.

It was during this time that her worldview and horizon expanded and she got exposed to the sociology of knowledge which later proved fundamental in her development of the concept of ‘standpoint epistemology’. She completed her Bachelors in Sociology from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1969 and Masters in teaching from Harvard University in 1970. She later works on the intersectionality between race, class, gender was influenced by her early childhood experiences of being the only African-American or first African-American woman in her educational environment. Patricia Hill Collins born to Albert Hill and Eunice Rudolph Hill on May 1 st, 1948 in Philadelphia grew up in a middle-class family as an only child.

Black feminist patricia hill collins