Intersectionality and Diversity in Higher Education,

What is ‘intersectionality’ and why does it matter to teachers and researchers of diversity in higher education? In this text, we approach intersectionality not just as concept that allows a critical enquiry into how class, gender and race shape society but also as praxis for social justice (Birge and Hill Collins 2016). For feminist researchers working on/about diversity, intersectionality constitutes a way of doing, sensing and thinking about the worlds we inhabit and construct, as teachers and researchers in higher education (Ahmed 2012, Harcourt et. al. 2016, Icaza 2015). Intersectionality has allowed feminist researchers to consider people and groups’ nuances in their experiences of exclusion and inclusion as emerging from the intersections of race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, body ableness and so on, instead of as an effect of one single mark or category o