Kimberlé Crenshaw
Feminist legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw will give a free public lecture at Gustavus Adolphus College on Friday, April 22 at 7:30 p.m. Held in Alumni Hall of the Johnson Student Union, Crenshaw’s lecture will address the unique barriers that women and girls of color face in completing school, accumulating wealth, and living free from public and private violence.
“Kimberlé Crenshaw is among the world’s great thinkers on institutional power, oppression, race, and sex/gender, and the world needs her kind of insights right now as much as at any time in history,” Gustavus Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) Program Director Martin Lang ’95 said.
Hosted by the Gustavus GWSS program, Crenshaw’s talk is titled “From Rosa Parks to Sandra Bland: Does the Arc of Struggle Bend Towards Justice for Black Women?” and will examine our important contemporary moment in its historical context as we contemplate the future trajectory of justice for black women and girls.
“One could argue that black women and girls face a two-pronged oppression—at one level for their race, and at another level for their gender. These are the kinds of important and often unseen intersections of oppression that Professor Crenshaw can help us to recognize and to resist,” Lang said. “Crenshaw’s education and activism shed light on ways that institutional oppression affects people’s lives, particularly when those people’s identities make them vulnerable to intersecting forms of oppression.”
Crenshaw is a leading authority in the area of civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law. Her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and Southern California Law Review. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop and the co-editor of the volume Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Crenshaw has lectured widely on race matters, addressing audiences across the country as well as in Europe, India, Africa, and South America. In 1996, she co-founded the African American Policy Forum to house a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion.
Twice awarded Professor of the Year at UCLA Law School, Crenshaw received the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award presented by the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, and the ACLU Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellowship from 2005-07. Crenshaw has received the Fulbright Distinguished Chair for Latin America, the Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship, and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2009 and a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2010. Currently, Crenshaw is Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) at Columbia Law School, which she founded in 2011.
Crenshaw’s presentation serves as this year’s Gustavus Moe Lecture in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. Sponsored by Karin and Robert Moe in honor of their daughter Kris, the Moe Lecture has brought speakers including Angela Davis and Chimamanda Adichie to campus.
For more information about Friday’s lecture, visit the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program’s Moe Lecture website.
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Media Contact: Director of Media Relations and Internal Communication Luc Hatlestad
luch@gustavus.edu
507-933-7510