The theme of our 2018 Annual Conference (Northumbria University, 10-12 April) is ‘Identity, community and social solidarity’, and we have three excellent plenary speakers who will bring their expertise to bear on this. They are Kimberlé Crenshaw, Omar Khan and Gregor McLennan.

• Kimberlé Crenshaw is a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she is Director of its Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, which she founded in 2011. She is also Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was twice named Professor of the Year. She is co-founder of the African American Policy Forum.

Professor Crenshaw has written in the areas of civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law.

She has lectured nationally and internationally on race matters, addressing audiences in Europe, Africa, and South America.

Her work on race and gender was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. In 2001, she authored the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism.

• Dr Omar Khan is the Director of the Runnymede Trust. Before this he was its Head of Policy.

He is a Governor at the University of East London. His other positions include Chair of the advisory group of the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester, Commissioner on the Financial Inclusion Commission, and a member of the 2014 REF assessment.

He is the author of pamphlets and other publications, including Financial Inclusion and Ethnicity; Caring and Earning Among Low-income Caribbean, Pakistani and Somali People; Who Pays to Access Cash?; Why Do Assets Matter?; A Sense of Place; and The Costs of ‘Returning’ Home.

He has spoken on topics including multiculturalism, integration, socio-economic disadvantage and positive action at the United Nations in Geneva, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, and at academic conferences in Manchester, Oxford, Paris and Warsaw.

He completed his DPhil in Political Theory at the University of Oxford, a Masters in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Masters in South Asian Studies at SOAS.

• Gregor McLennan is the Head of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

He has worked the Open University and before taking up his position at Bristol he was Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at Massey University, New Zealand.

He is co-editor of five collective volumes in social and political theory and the author of six books: Marxism and the Methodologies of History (1981); Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond (1989); Pluralism (1995); Sociological Cultural Studies: Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences (2006); Exploring Society (3rd edition 2010, co-authored); and The Story of Sociology (2011). He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow, from 2012 to 2013 and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

His main research interests are social theory; ideology and politics; and the philosophy of social sciences.