Kimberlé Crenshaw: Backtalker — In Conversation with Afua Hirsch
The legal scholar who coined intersectionality tells her life story in conversation with Afua Hirsch, introduced by Thandiwe Newton, at Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Why we picked this
Crenshaw gave American law and activism the concept of intersectionality — and has spent decades defending it from institutional and political attack. Afua Hirsch is one of the few British interlocutors with the depth to match her.
This is the rare kind of event that earns the word essential: one of the most influential legal thinkers of the last half-century, in conversation with one of Britain’s sharpest public intellectuals, telling a story that cuts through the noise of culture-war abstraction to the lived experience underneath. The Queen Elizabeth Hall setting — large enough for gravitas, intimate enough for candour — is exactly right.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is a professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School whose 1989 paper introducing the concept of intersectionality changed the language available to activists, lawyers, and scholars working on overlapping systems of discrimination. The concept describes what happens when race and gender compound each other in ways that single-axis legal frameworks cannot capture — and it has since become one of the most widely used and most aggressively contested ideas in American public life. In Backtalker: An American Memoir, Crenshaw traces the path from a spirited girl in Canton, Ohio, to the front lines of the legal battles that defined civil rights in the United States — including a back door at Harvard Law School, the suppression of women’s testimony in the civil rights movement, and the sustained campaign to remove her ideas from American education.
Afua Hirsch, award-winning journalist and author of Brit(ish), brings both a British perspective on American racial frameworks and a precise critical intelligence that resists flattery. The event is introduced by actor and activist Thandiwe Newton, a longtime Crenshaw collaborator. Running approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. Tickets from £22 plus booking fee.