Intersectionality and Education

Abstract

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).

Breaking One Law to Uphold Another: How Schools Provide Services to English Learners with Disabilities

“…Intersectionality can be used as a lens in education to understand both policy and practice (Grant & Zwier, ). In its origins, intersectionality illuminates the role of policies, laws, and governing in constricting the opportunities of intersectional individuals (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, ; Crenshaw, , ).…”

“…In practice, institutions such as schools can construct and perpetuate inequalities between minority social categories for intersectional individuals (Anthias, ; Dill, ). Instead of being a vehicle for social change, schools can “function as oppressive systems that fail to meet some students’ needs and discriminate against them” in ways that may not even be known to members of the school (Grant & Zwier, , p. 7). Examining schools in this way, an intersectional analysis can attend to institutions’ organization of intersectional individuals (Anthias, ), allocation of resources (Crenshaw, ; Yuval‐Davis, ), and discourses produced about minority social categories and those who represent them (Anthias, ).…”

“There Is No Perfect School”: The Complexity of School Decision‐Making Among Lesbian and Gay Adoptive Parents

“…Intersectionality holds that social identities such as sexual orientation, gender, race, social class, and nationality do not operate as distinct categories but are lived conjointly (Crenshaw, ; Few‐Demo, ; Veenstra, ). Parents' identities and those of their children interact to shape their experiences, opportunities, choices, and challenges in relation to schools (Grant & Zwier, ). By exploring the intersections of families' sexual minority, adoptive, and racial statuses, we can illuminate the complexity of lived experiences at the “crossroads” of these identities and within the broader institutional systems of oppression and privilege (Crenshaw, ).…”

“…By exploring the intersections of families' sexual minority, adoptive, and racial statuses, we can illuminate the complexity of lived experiences at the “crossroads” of these identities and within the broader institutional systems of oppression and privilege (Crenshaw, ). Although parents in this study hold identities that are marginalized in U.S. society at large (i.e., sexual minority identity, adoptive family structure, multiracial family status), an intersectional approach highlights how parental social class, resulting from advantages linked to education and wealth (and among men, gender), also affords privileges that may shape their experiences in their communities and when navigating schools (Grant & Zwier, ). Parents with greater education are more likely to select private or alternative public schools (Goyette, ; Pugh, ) in that education level is an indicator of the value they place on education (Ogawa & Dutton, ), but also because education provides parents with access to networks of information, which shape knowledge and choice of schools (Goyette & Lareau, ).…”

Intersectionality, Race-Gender Subordination, and Education

“…For instance, Volume 2 of James Banks's four-volume Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education contains extended sections on intersectionality. A long and introductory entry on intersectionality is written by Grant and Zwier (2012), followed by another entry on "Intersectionality of race, class, gender, and ethnicity" by Caruthers and Carter (2012;see also Grant & Zwier, 2011). Although more closely associated with multiculturalism, Grant and Zwier provide a lengthy genealogy of intersectionality in the social sciences, which centers Crenshaw but includes other influences like Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and Iris Marion Young (1990).…”