Un/Doing Intersectionality through Higher Education Research

Grounded in Black feminist and critical race theories, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term “intersectionality” to the academy in 1989 to demonstrate how U.S. structures, such as the legal system, and discourses of resistance, such as feminism and anti-racism, often frame identities as isolated and mutually exclusive, resulting in the “theoretical erasure” of Black women who hold multiple minoritized identities. Since 1989, intersectionality has become a “traveling theory,” that has crossed into and influenced almost every academic discipline, including higher education. Through this study, we examined how researchers in higher education do and undo intersectionality and, subsequently, how intersectional analyses may advance a radical social justice agenda in higher education. To explore how scholars un/do intersectionality in higher education, we conducted a summative content analysis of 97 higher education articles that used the term “intersectionality” in some manner. The goal of the study was not to offer a prescriptive way to use intersectionality. In fact, theoretically musing over the precise way in which intersectionality should be done may confine the concept to an overly academic contemplative exercise and therefore, undo intersectionality. Instead, through this research, we aimed to explore and use intersectionality in a manner that advances a transformative social justice agenda.