Privilege, Oppression, Diversity, and Social Justice: Understanding and Enacting Critical Intersectionality in Research

In recent years, research incorporating intersectionality into methodologies and epistemologies has exploded. The word “intersectionality” has also recently surfaced for the first time in public speeches by national politicians and leaders. While this concept has grown in prominence, it remains elusive in many ways and has tended to move away from its critical theory roots.

When Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term in the late 1980’s, she used it to question the legal system’s compartmentalization of Black women who repeatedly lost discrimination cases when courts required evidence of either sex or race discrimination. Since then, scholars have broadened the approach to many other foci, and worked to create expanded methodologies and epistemologies for scholarship. While originally conceived through a lens of power and oppression, intersectionality approaches increasingly tend to focus on intersectional oppression through an individual lens by focusing on individual identities as opposed to systems of power and oppression. This roundtable aims to inform social work discourse and research by engaging participants in methods that infuse intersectionality and critical theory, with its focus on self-reflective and collective knowledge building and power, larger systems, and social justice.

In May 2015, the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work’s Critical Intersectionality Learning Community held a two-day working conference focused on critical intersectionality and research methods. The conference involved several types of participatory action research methods and interspersed knowledge dissemination and development with a focus on identifying methods for and issues in incorporating critical intersectionality into different epistemologies and research methodologies. Participatory action research methods throughout the conference included (1) framework positionalities; (2) lightning talks; (3) Open Space Technologies and (4) World Café. Topics included approaches to quantitative, qualitative and transformative mixed-methods; different ways of defining and operationalizing intersectionality; and defining and navigating issues related to power and justice within research development, implementation, and dissemination. The conference also included many opportunities to identify themes through reflection. Framework positionality activities assisted participants in reflecting on their positionalities, epistemological assumptions, definitions of justice, and research methods, identifying similarities and differences across topics and disciplines.

Drawing on this conference, this roundtable aims to contribute new insights about critical intersectionality and its application in multiple types of research. Presenters, representing both conference organizers and participants, will first provide brief lightning talks about the meaning and principles of critical intersectionality, issues in incorporating intersectionality in different research approaches, and the use of participatory action methods to extract themes and further knowledge. Building on these activities, participants will engage in discussions about how to build a stronger critical intersectionality framework by addressing the following questions: What is critical intersectionality, and how can it be applied to social work research? Presenters will guide roundtable discussions by using the methods employed in the working conference. Thus, the roundtable will not only provide content about epistemology and research methodology related to critical intersectionality, but will also introduce participants to participatory action research methods which can be used to generate new knowledge in ways that reflect an emerging critical intersectionality method.