What is intersectionality? What is the context of its original formulation? What did it set out to describe or prescribe? How has it evolved since? What are its successes and failures? What came after intersectionality?
Please join us for a decolonial critique on the analytical concept popular within academia and mainstream activist circles known as intersectionality. Although widely used in liberationist rhetoric here in the UK, both on- and offline, it can be listed as one of many U.S imports that have been ‘borrowed’ to be applied to political issues of categorical difference locally. First formulated in critical race theory schools of thought burgeoning in American universities just over two decades ago, DL would like to lead a discussion in tandem with one of the school’s most prolific and radical thinkers about the assumptive logics, ethical implications, and ultimately, methodological value of perhaps the school’s most fetishized theory. In what we hope to be a constructive discussion that will reorient our perspectives and indeed goals with regards to countering the triumvirate of white supremacy, coloniality and antiblackness, Dr. Tommy J. Curry will speak about his critical work on the subject of method in interaction with participants’ questions, expectations and needs for clarity.
Tommy J. Curry’s work spans across the various fields of philosophy, jurisprudence, Africana Studies, and Gender Studies. Though trained in American and Continental philosophical traditions, Curry’s primary research interests are in Critical Race Theory and Africana Philosophy. In Critical Race Theory, Curry looks at the work of Derrick Bell and his theory of racial realism as an antidote to the proliferating discourses of racial idealism that continue to uncritically embrace liberalism through the appropriation of European thinkers as the basis of racial reconciliation in the United States. In Africana philosophy, Curry’s work turns an eye towards the conceptual genealogy (intellectual history) of African American thought from 1800 to the present, with particular attention towards the scholars of the American Negro Academy and the Negro Society for Historical Research. In Biomedical ethics, Curry is primarily interested in government regulation, the ethical limits of government intervention in the practice of medicine, and democratic potentialities that arise from collaborative doctor-patient diagnoses and regenerative medicine like stem cells. Currently his research focuses on the linking the conceptualization of ethics found in the Belmont Report to Civil Rights and social justice paradigms.
Please read and listen to the following in preparation of this conversation:
The Limits of the Intersectional Axiom – A Conversation with Dr. Tommy J. Curry by Vitamin_D on Mixcloud