In this article the authors consider NAME's focus on intersectionality as a tool for theorizing, researching, and employing in pre-K through college practice at preservice and inservice levels. A review of research using three or more identity axes to investigate student outcomes is included. The authors also discuss the benefits of analyzing educational questions intersectionally, noting cautions.The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.-The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

Intersectionality theories, intersectionally informed methodologies, and intersectional praxis seek to explain, critique, and transform relationships of oppression and privilege among individuals, groups, and institutions. These shifting power relationships are co-constructed through identity categories and justified by symbolic representations. Given the plurality of intersectional theories, no one definition can encompass the diverse strands of scholarship that make up this arena. However, Winker and Degele 2011 proposes a useful multilevel analytical approach that traces how intersectional privilege and oppression are created, maintained, and contested (see also Analytical Frameworks). The researchers’ framework is key to understanding the organization of this article around three concepts: identity constructions (how difference is made and unmade between the self and others), symbolic representations (norms, ideologies, images), and social structures (class, gender, race, and body), with their accompanying power relations (classisms, heteronormativisms, racisms, and bodyisms) (see also Winker and Degele 2011). Work using intersectionality theories in the field of education may be focused on microlevel phenomena, such as individual identity development and interpersonal relationships; meso-level phenomena, in the case of school policies and practices that respond to intersectional identities; or macro-level phenomena, like educational funding schemes that produce intersectional privilege or oppression for particular groups. Scholarly work in the field of education that predates the use of the term “intersectionality” speaks of human relations, interactions, integration, and bridging perspectives (see also Intersectionality’s Early Expressions in Education). Scholars and educators in the cross-disciplinary field of intersectionality and education draw on research about individual and group experiences within schools and universities, as well as the scholarship, activism, and policy work of black feminist theorists and sociologists (see also Intersectionality’s Development in Feminist Theory and Praxis). Intersectional research in education has kept a dual focus on theory and practice, though the latter tends to have primacy given the discipline’s applied nature (see also K–12 Education, Teacher Education, Higher Education, Comparative and International Education, Educational Policy).

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