Intersectionality and Education

Over the last 30 years in the social sciences, intersectionality as a concept, research paradigm, and theory for analyzing the interactions of different cultural and social categories of oppression and privilege has developed and expanded within the United States and internationally. In European countries, scholars are employing intersectionality as a conceptual and analytical tool to study social context, groups, and relations. As a unit of analysis, intersectionality is pushing the boundaries in critical legal studies, gender studies, sociology, social movements, public policy, international human rights, and racial/ethnic politics. In addition, the United Nations has sponsored conferences on intersectionality. In education, intersectionality as a concept for framing theoretical arguments regarding policy and practice, and as an approach to conducting research on and/or in schools, has for the most part been slow to gain traction, as we observe from our literature review and as Carl Grant and Christine Sleeter reported in their seminal article published in 1988.

This analysis of intersectionality and education is guided by the social justice and multicultural literature. Social justice, according to political philosopher Iris Young, is “the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression,” (Young, 1990, p. 15) within a framework that Nancy Fraser argues includes both economic redistribution and cultural recognition. According to multicultural scholars, multiculturalism is a commitment to pluralism and diversity that prepares students to be active participants in a democratic society, affecting social change through the transformation of self, school, and society, and working for equitable distributions of power among groups. An analysis of the social justice and multicultural literature raises two important points: (1) questions and problems beg to be conceptualized and analyzed through more than one axis and (2) gaps in students' academic achievement are located along more than one axis.

In this entry, intersectionality is defined, and a rationale is offered for using it theoretically and to inform methodologies as well as to analyze policy and practice. This discussion of intersectionality is about the intersection of three or more characteristics (e.g., race, class, gender, religion, immigration status, sexual orientation, language). Single- and double-axis analyses have made important contributions to education. Nevertheless, analyses that consider the intersection of three or more characteristics more completely illuminate the complexity of lived experiences at crossroads of multiple identities and within systems of oppression and privilege.