An intersectional critical realist approach to understanding (in)justices through academic careers

Understanding how the (in)equalities relating to class, race, gender, ethnicity, etc. intersected and impacted upon academic careers and universities was central to a longitudinal biographical study (2011–2021) of 14 diverse humanities and social sciences academics. Hence, a unique critical theoretical framework was developed through the analysis of data. The proposed framework is pertinent to comparative studies of European academic careers. It combines Patricia Hill Collins’s Cognitive Architecture of Intersectionality (CAoI), Margaret Archer’s critical realist (CR) conceptions of life projects, structure, culture, agency (SCA) and an articulation of CR epistemological and ontological conceptual tools that lean on Andrew Sayer. Key affordances are that: (a) the CAoI centres the approaches, values and perspectives from decades of intersectional research throughout the Archerian and CR analyses; (b) consistent language of the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of intersectionality facilitates comparisons of the mechanisms underpinning the distinct intersectional structural, cultural and agentic inequities underpinning national higher education systems and the various complexities of new and emergent intersectional inequalities; (c) the interlinked causal chains of intersectional inequities identified provide new heuristic approaches to tackling inequalities and explain why current individualised and numerically focused initiatives cannot sufficiently address the problems of social justice.