Kellner Intellectual Analysis

Hulya Eker

Discussion Questions: (1) Kellner distinguishes between “functional” and “critical oppositional public intellectuals. What are the major distinctions? Which of the two styles of theorizing most appeals to you? Why? I’d like to start answering this question with Kellner’s definition of Intellectual because it helped me to better understand the rest of the article and I think it might help others too. We all know what “intellectual” means but here is Kellner’s definition of intellectual from his article “Techno-Politics, New Technologies, and New Public Spheres”; “The concept of the intellectual traditionally involved workers in the sphere of mental labor, who produced ideas, wrote text, and developed and transmitted intellectual abilities as opposed to manual workers who produced good and worked with their hand in the realms of manufacture, heavy industry, agriculture and other field that primarily depended on manual labor”.

Give an example from your life that exemplifies how intersections of some of your multiple statuses (e.g., gender, race, class, age, etc.) affect your social experience.
Collin thinks “race, class and gender represent the three system of oppression that most heavily affects African American women”. She also believes there are other groups than Black Women being affected by this oppression.

In her article “Black feminist thought in the matrix of domination” Collin states “Race, class and gender constitute axes of oppression that characterize black women’s experience within a more generalized matrix of domination.” By “matrix of domination” she means black women mostly affected oppression because of the race, class and gender factors of the matrix of domination but other group of people might be affected for other dimension of the matrix such as ethnicity and