SEMINAR 1

Module 1 – SEMINAR

[Reading time: 8 minutes]

Context: Intersectionality Studies at the UofA

In 2018, Research at the Intersections of Gender (RIG) became one of only five university-wide so-called Signature Areas of Research and Teaching at the University of Alberta. This was supported by funding from the Vice President Research and Innovation and by a grant from the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies. Later shortened to Intersections of Gender (IG), the goal of this signature area was to both support ongoing gender research across all Faculties and Campuses at the University of Alberta and to build further capacity specifically for intersectional approaches.

The name of this initiative “Intersections of Gender” posed from the beginning a conundrum. IG’s goal was to elevate the gender-related research of over 200 University of Alberta faculty members. These faculty members were already doing gender-related research (broadly conceived) across all fields and disciplines. This spans from Engineering to Pediatrics, from Art History to Sport and Recreation, and everywhere in between. This research is often made invisible in an institution the size of the University of Alberta. Gender-based research is still considered by many “minor” research. They see it as a tiny specialized subfield in a discipline. Others view it as the exclusive domain of small Women’s and Gender Studies Departments.

If you are taking this course, you probably are well aware of the discriminatory and at times even devastating effect of research and research data that ignores gender as a factor. Lots of research still takes men as the default and ignores women and gender-diverse people as non-existent, atypical, or entirely irrelevant. Caroline Criada Perez (2019) calls this the “one-size-fits-men” approach. In her book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World designed for Men, Criado Perez offers extensive examples of the negative effects of a world that seemingly is built for men.

On the one hand, IG’s goal was to elevate and support already existing cross-faculty and interdisciplinary gender-related research. And to give recognition of this an area of excellence at the University of Alberta.

Mapping IG-related scholars at the University of Alberta

On the other hand, the initiators of IG were cognizant of the epistemological, methodological, and political shortcomings of an exclusive focus on gender in research. They understood that research must consider gender as always intersecting with other socially constructed categories of difference. These categories include Indigeneity, race, disability, class, sexuality, citizenship, language, and so on. Or, as Audre Lorde, cited at the beginning of this module, emphasizes: none of us live single-issue lives.

Thus, IG’s objective was to support and build capacity across the whole university for intersectional-type research. The goal was for intersectional approaches to become the gold standard of impactful research that seeks to foster social justice. As we will consider later in this course, mainstreaming and upscaling intersectionality from its activist and political origins is not without pitfalls.

From the beginning, IG’s commitment was to training future generations of researchers. Planning involved creating a new intersectional methodology course, open to students from all faculties and disciplines. The aim of such course was to create opportunities for students not only in gender and social justice studies and its related fields but in any discipline to have access to further training in intersectional theory, research design, and community engagement.

Thus we created the course you are taking right now.

Between 2018 and 2023, IG organized numerous events (seminars, lectures, conferences, professional development workshops etc.) with local, national, and international scholars, activists and artists. Many of these, especially, during the pandemic, were recorded and still are accessible. An internal granting program supported graduate student and faculty research. “Snakes and Ladders,” a mentorship program for racialized graduate students, was started by IG’s inaugural Associate Director, Dr. Dia da Costa, a professor in the Faculty of Education.

Examples of IG events

In 2023, after funding for the University’s Signature Area program ended, IG transitioned into the new Institute for Intersectional Studies. This created a more permanent “interdisciplinary hub devoted to advancing and mobilizing intersectional approaches to research, teaching, policy, and practice” at the University of Alberta.

Watch

Watch this Video Profile of the 2023 Rhodes Scholarship recipient, Abigail Isaac about her research

While you watch, consider how Abigail Isaac’s research reflects an intersectional approach.

[Viewing time: 4 min]

Paradigm, Methodology, Method and Epistemology

‘Intersectionality’ refers to the interactions between gender, race, and other categories of [socially constructed] difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power. (Davis 2008: 68)

As a critical concept ‘intersectionality’ helps us to recognize how multiple forms of exclusion and subordination interact, thereby shaping specific experiences of oppression and privilege based on complex and multi-factor identities. Initially coined by the African American legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 in an analysis of the specific experiences of oppression of Black women in anti-discrimination legal doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics, the term since has travelled widely – geographically, politically, institutionally, and methodologically beyond women’s studies and related fields of feminist and social justice scholarship (Davis 2008, McCall 2005).

As a paradigm, or basic belief or worldview, intersectionality insists that social differences, like gender, Indigeneity, race, class, sexuality, disability etc., are not separate categories of experience, identity, and social location. Instead, these are socially constructed differences that interact in all our lives, structure social institutions, and shape representations in ways that influence political access, equality, and the potential for justice.

When we speak of gender, race, class, sexuality, disability etc. as socially constructed categories of difference, we suggest that these categories of differentiation have specific histories rather than representing unchangeable biological or natural “truth”. For example, we can trace the ‘invention’ of racial categories and their shifting meaning and significance, with Stuart Hall famously calling race “a floating signifier.” Gender is performatively produced (Butler 1992) and “a doing” (Fenstermaker and West 1987), which sediments in seemingly natural and bodily differences over time.

Biologists have analyzed a spectrum of sexual differences in excess of the socially constructed binary of male and female still taken for granted by many. Critical disability studies scholars have long pointed out how, for example, built environments and social norms of productivity construct ever-shifting populations as “impaired,” thereby obfuscating the disabling effects of built environments and social norms (Garland Thompson 2002). Indigeneity can not be reduced to “blood quantum,” which is a colonial determination. And, historians of sexuality have pointed to both the “invention” of heterosexuality and its normalization as the dominant form of sexuality (Katz 1990, Somerville 2000).

So when we look cross-culturally and cross-historically, we can see how categorizations and valuations of most human differences have shifted, at times, dramatically. And mostly, these social valuations of human differences play a role as regulatory regimes to separate and normalize racial, gendered, class and other social hierarchies. But to say that social differences are constructed as methods of control does not mean that the identities grounded in them are not salient or meaningful. Instead, social differences and the identities they create are both instruments of social and political regulation and important sites of community building and political resistance. Overall, intersectionality must not be reduced to a theory of complex and multifaceted identities. Instead, it is a paradigm or worldview that recognizes how different forms of oppression (and privilege) operate to construct complex, situationally, and relationally specific identities and experiences.

With Ange-Marie Hancock (2016), we approach this course as an introduction to intersectionality as a research paradigm that shapes the methodologies, methods, and epistemologies to guide our research.

Methodology refers to the conceptual framework that guides the deployment of specific research methods (Nagy Hesse-Biber 2007). Research methods can be conceptualized as what is ‘done’, that is, the techniques of collecting data (interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, photographs, videos, observation, etc.). By contrast, methodology refers to the theory or logic behind the selection and deployment of these methods. Methodologies are guided by epistemologies, or the assumptions about reality that guide the strategic deployment of methods.

Thus, this intersectional methodology course is not, or less so, a technical “how-to guide,” than an introduction to intersectionality as a framework, lens, or paradigm research and activism. In the introduction to a 2005 special issue of the academic journal Signs on intersectionality, co-editors Leslie McCall, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Sumi Cho explain:

… intersectionality is best framed as an analytic sensibility. If intersectionality is an analytic disposition, a way of thinking about and conducting analyses, then what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term “intersectionality,” nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations. Rather, what makes an analysis intersectional— whatever terms it deploys …—is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing— conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power—emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is. (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 794) [emphasis added]

In this course, we follow their lead and that of others by addressing intersectionality as a methodology rather than method. Throughout this course, intersectionality is addressed as a lens and a paradigm, a way of thinking and acting rather than a specific research protocol. This also means that intersectional research can utilize any number of methods, can be both quantitative or qualitative as long as an analysis of power and a dynamic understanding of the multiple categories of difference are consider.

We will take a closer look at at Cho et all (2005) article in the first module.