Are you thinking about intersectionality wrong?

Let's rethink how we apply intersectional thinking in community engagement.

The concept of intersectionality has become increasingly important in policy, health, and social justice. Organisations and governments are now seeking design research and community engagement practices demonstrating an understanding of this concept. However, as the buzz around intersectionality grows and as it conceptually travels from academia into public life, there's a risk of oversimplification, particularly when applied to design thinking.

Originally coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, the concept of intersectionality encourages us to recognise and understand the intersecting nature of social identities and the resulting complex web of privilege and oppression. What is important about Crenshaw's work is that intersectionality is used to highlight how compounded systemic marginalisation creates new challenges. These new challenges can sometimes be overlooked if the compounded systems are misunderstood.

Addressing diversity is often reduced to a mere checklist in the recruitment or engagement processes or token acknowledgment in public consultations. The checkbox approach attempts to achieve intersectional engagement but often stops at simply recruiting diverse people into the research and saying, “Yes, done, tick.”

A truly intersectional approach involves examining the specific ways identity and context intersect for that particular service or audience. It seeks to engage participants who have multiple identities at these intersections in order to better understand how these complex catalysts of identity affect the service experience.

A checkbox mentality falls short of capturing the true essence of intersectionality, rendering it a hollow exercise in diversity rather than a tool for transformative change.

Next time you plan a community engagement project, consider if the challenges you are addressing are actually the result of systemic overlaps. Can you take the next step in your engagement to address this complexity?

The key to unlocking the transformative power of intersectionality in design thinking lies in embracing complexity. Designers and policymakers must move beyond surface-level diversity considerations and grapple with the intricate relationships between various intersecting identities. It's time to shift our focus from checkboxes to the intricate tapestry of intersecting identities that shape our world.

This piece is part of a series on intersectionality and its use in design thinking. In the next couple of weeks, I will be sharing practical tools to bring the complexity of intersectionality into practice.