INTERSECTIONALITY

Grounded in black feminist scholarship and activism (e.g., Collins, 1990; Combahee River Collective, 1977; hooks, 1984) and formally coined in 1989, by black legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, intersectionality has been used across a significant number of disciplines.  The key to interrogating systems of inequity and inequality is an understanding that social relationships are intersectional, meaning that the multiple dimensions involved in inequality   are complex, overlapping, and intertwined with existing structural power arrangements. By applying an intersectional lens to explore social conditions such as poverty that shape or contextualize lived experiences, scholars from multiple disciplines contribute to developing and placing new knowledge into action by deconstructing old myths such as poor are lazy and recommending solution-driven policy changes. Generally speaking, intersectionality is an analytic strategy that is characterized by the following assumptions:

• The experiences and struggles of historically excluded and disenfranchised groups have been shaped by  multiple institutional sectors, such as schooling, that influence their life choices and access to the opportunity structure;
• The nature of power relations and its implementation in maintaining interconnected structures of inequality  affect individual and group identities and experiences;
• Mutually co-constituted identities of race, ethnicity, class and gender are identity markers in U.S. and are inscribed in institutional structures that construct negative representations of historically colonized groups
• Knowledge production efforts promote social justice and social change by linking research and practice, thus creating a holistic approach to the reduction of social inequality in U.S. society.