Review of Research in Education

In this chapter, we unpack intersectionality as an analytical framework. First, we cite Black Lives Matter as an impetus for discussing intersectionality’s current traction. Second, we review the genealogy of “intersectionality” beginning with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s formulation, which brought a Black Studies provocation into legal discourse in order to challenge existing antidiscrimination doctrine and single-axis theorizing. The third, and most central, task of the chapter is our account of intersectionality’s utility for social analysis. We examine some of the issues raised by the metaphor of the intersection and some of the debates surrounding the concept, such as the tension between fragmenting and universalizing perspectives mediated by the notion of “strategic essentialism.” Fourth, we review how education researchers have explained race and gender subordination in education since Ladson-Billings and Tate’s Teachers College Record article. We conclude with some remarks concerning future research on intersectionality.

Drawing on research in education, Black Girlhood studies, and conversations connected to girlhood and cartography, this chapter calls for transdisciplinary analyses of Black girls’ sociocultural and geopolitical locations in education research. In reviewing education research documenting the practices and interrogating the experiences of Black girls, I propose the framework of Black Girl Cartography. In addition to an analysis of education research, I offer a series of theoretical and methodological openings for transformative and liberatory work grounded in Black Girl knowledge and practices.

In this review, we explore how intersectionality has been engaged with through the lens of disability critical race theory (DisCrit) to produce new knowledge. In this chapter, we (1) trace the intellectual lineage for developing DisCrit, (2) review the body of interdisciplinary scholarship incorporating DisCrit to date, and (3) propose the future trajectories of DisCrit, noting challenges and tensions that have arisen. Providing new opportunities to investigate how patterns of oppression uniquely intersect to target students at the margins of Whiteness and ability, DisCrit has been taken up by scholars to expose and dismantle entrenched inequities in education.

To date, the theory of intersectionality has largely guided qualitative efforts in social science and education research. Translating the construct to new methodological approaches is inherently complex and challenging, but offers the possibility of breaking down silos that keep education researchers with similar interests—but different methodological approaches—from sharing knowledge. Quantitative approaches that emphasize the varied impacts of individual identities on educational outcomes move beyond singular dimensions capturing individual characteristics, drawing a parallel to intersectionality. Scholars interested in heterogeneous effects recognize the shortcomings of focusing on the effect of a single social identity. This integrative review explores techniques used in quantitative research to examine heterogeneous effects across individual background, drawing on methodological literature from the social sciences and education. I examine the goals and challenges of the quantitative techniques and explore how they relate to intersectionality. I conclude by discussing what education researchers can learn from other applied fields that are working to develop a crosswalk across the two disparate, but interconnected, literatures.

This review assesses intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to transnational education policy research. In particular, we are concerned with how the concept is translated and interpreted to interrogate globally circulating education policies and how that transformation might inform the concept within Western and Northern contexts. We acknowledge intersectionality’s origins in U.S. Black feminist scholarship, but anticipate transformations as it travels to “Other” contexts and is translated to theorize systemic inequality in particular albeit interconnected spaces. Examining Eastern and Southern Hemisphere English-language, Chinese-language, and Spanish-language peer-reviewed publications, we ask how intersectionality translates to languages other than English and to Eastern and Southern contexts, and what analytic insights are gained from intersectionality’s travel and translation that may contribute to its reconceptualization in Northern and Western contexts. Intersectionality coupled with transnationalism provides theoretical and methodological might toward understanding complex systems of inequality through/in which education policy travels, critiquing how inequality continues to flourish within nation-states and global-level hierarchies and privileging non-Western/Southern struggles for equity.

In this chapter, I use figure hiding as a metaphor representing the processes of exclusion and suppression that critical mathematics education (CME) seeks to address. Figure hiding renders identities and modes of thought in mathematics education and mathematics education research invisible. CME has a commitment to addressing figure hiding by making visible what has been obscured and bringing to the center what has been marginalized. While the tentacles of CME research address different analytical domains, much of this work can be connected to the social isms that plague our world (e.g., sexism, racism, heterosexism, colonialism, capitalism, ableism, militarism, nationalism, religious sectarianism). However, the trend in CME research is to address these isms in silos, which does not reflect the compounded forms of oppression that many experience. I review CME studies that employ intersectionality as a way of analyzing the complexities of oppression. Intersectionality’s limited use in CME research has been for identity-based analyses. I offer intersectional analysis as a strategy to extend intersectionality’s power beyond identity toward more systemic analyses.

First-generation students (FGSs) have received a great deal of attention in education research, practice, and policy. The difficulty of understanding and subsequently addressing the various and persistent configurations of inequality associated with FGSs lies with the complicated yet obscure state of the FGS term itself. Leaving the term unquestioned limits the capacity to grasp how these students’ backgrounds and identities shape their decisions and relationships to others and to institutions, and risks reproducing the very inequality that education researchers wish to mitigate. This chapter begins to resolve these conflicts by offering a critical analysis and discussion—grounded by the concept of intersectionality—of the empirical literature on FGSs. We identify and discuss the dominant and problematic manner in which the FGS term has been operationalized in research and discuss the implications of their findings. We end with a discussion on emerging topics that extends the consideration of research on FGSs beyond the imaginary, traditional boundaries of college campuses.

This chapter reviews scholarship using intersectional analyses to assess how Latina/o and Chicana/o youth navigate imbricated systems of privilege and oppression in their educational trajectories. Scholars have explored the navigational tactics Latina/o and Chicana/o students use to negotiate their intersectional identities and the institutional practices that amplify or negate experiences of privilege or disenfranchisement. Others have articulated distinct forms of overlapping oppression, such as racist nativism, gendered familism, privilege paradox, and citizenship continuum. Researchers have also developed a methodology for intersectional analysis that combines both quantitative and qualitative elements, as well as a conceptual model that maps out the micro, meso, and macro levels of intersectionality to account for both structure and agency within multifaceted dynamics of power. This chapter notes the reliance on race- and gender-based frameworks, on interviews and focus groups, and on college-age or graduate students for intersectional analysis on Latina/o and Chicana/o students. Together, the chapter reveals the complexity of capturing the multitiered planes of privilege and power that intersect in dynamic ways to disenfranchise and empower Latina/o and Chicana/o students.

In this chapter, we offer a critical intersectional analysis of quality in early childhood education with the aim of moving away from a singular understanding of “best practice,” thereby interrupting the inequities such a concept fosters. While acknowledging how injustices are intersectionally constructed, we specifically identified critical race theory as a counterstory to White supremacy, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies as counterstories to monocultural teaching practices grounded in deficit and inferiority paradigms, and translanguaging as a counterstory to the (over)privileging of dominant American English monolingualism. While each of these counterstories forefronts one particular dimension of oppression, together they account for multiple, intersecting systems of oppressions; combined, they expand the cartography of early childhood education and serve to (re)center the definition of quality on the lives, experiences, voices, and values of multiply minoritized young children, families, and communities. Rejecting oppressive and reductionist notions of quality, through the use of re-mediation, this article offers design principles for intersectionally just early childhood education with the potential to transform the architecture of quality.

In this chapter, we argue that intersectionality is a theoretical and methodological framework by which education researchers can critically examine why and how students in STEM fields who are members of intersecting marginalized groups have distinctive experiences related to their social identities, other psychological processes, and educational outcomes. Taken separately, the bodies of education research focused on the experiences of Black students and female students in STEM fields often render Black women and girls “hidden figures” in that they have not sufficiently addressed their simultaneous racialized and gendered experiences in educational contexts. Additionally, we find that the current discourse on intersectionality is limited in that it does not attend to key psychological processes associated with identity and the intersectional experience in STEM education. We take a theoretical and methodological approach to examining intersectionality in STEM education and provide a new interpretation of the literature on Black women and girls in this social context. A synthesis of (N = 60) research studies revealed that (1) identity; (2) STEM interest, confidence, and persistence; (3) achievement, ability perceptions, and attributions; and (4) socializers and support systems are key themes within the experiences of Black women and girls in STEM education. Our analysis also highlights the ways that researchers have employed intersectionality to make the experiences of Black women and girls in STEM education more visible, or “unhidden.” We discuss these findings from a psychological perspective and provide insights to guide future research and practice directions in STEM education.

In this review of research, we explore intersectionality in the literature on K–12 educational leadership. We seek to understand how researchers have used intersectionality and what their findings or arguments reveal about the work of leading to reduce inequities in education. We ask, What traditions and trends associated with intersectionality have been brought into educational leadership research to inform the development of transformative leadership? The sample includes 15 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 2005 and 2017. We identify the themes individualism and knowledge relations, which leads us to three interrelated findings concerning conceptions of leadership and intersectionality. We find that intersectionality primarily (1) is used to support micro-level analysis rather than both micro-level and macro-level analysis of the inequities being confronted by leadership practice, (2) is used to focus on individuals’ experiences as “leaders” and “leadership” capacity rather than “leading” practices, and (3) serves as an emergent knowledge project in its support of agendas related to transformative educational leadership. We discuss how the use of intersectionality, conceptions of leadership, and leadership and research practices coincide, pointing to the implications for the continued use of intersectionality in educational leadership, and provide recommendations to support the use of intersectionality in future research.

The purpose of this chapter is to systematically review the research within the field of education that explicitly examined how various social constructions of identity intersect with dis/ability to qualitatively affect young adults’ experiences by asking the following question: What are the key findings in education research focusing on youth and young adults with disabilities who are multiply situated in terms of race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, or other social markers? Our conceptual framework included a sociohistorical approach that culled from intersectionality and disability studies in education that centered on the intersectional lived experiences of youth within K–16 educational contexts. In our research, we found 10 qualifying studies that illuminated how youth create meaning along the lines of their disabilities and their intersections, and we summarized these within the following three themes: (a) navigate intersectional disability discourses, (b) present their dis/ability oppression as intersectional, and (c) engage in their identity meaning making as a form of intersectional discourse. We conclude by situating these findings within the larger body of intersectionality disability studies in education research and provide future implications.

“Ain’t nobody gonna get me down!” —Kiesha (Petersen, 2009, p. 434)