Intersectionality: a critical tool for analyzing social complexity

Originating from black feminist theory intersectionality has become within the last decade a broad interdisciplinary heuristics for analyzing interlocking social divisions: race, class, gender and other differences are no longer seen in isolation or in cumulative models but in their mutual constitution and complex entanglements. Within the field of intersectionality there have not only been explicit references to critical realism (e.g. Leslie McCall, Silvia Walby); in addition many scholars work with a quasi-archerian social ontology of structure, culture, and agency. Thus, intersectionality bears the potential to productively mediate between different social theories and critical traditions. However, the complexity-oriented character of intersectionality also brings about some theoretical and political intricacies. To this day, it is not settled whether intersectional analysis refers to a limited ensemble of social inequalities or to an open-ended list of differences and identities. More politically speaking, it is still contested whether intersectionality is a tool of a renewed critical social theory or whether it belongs to an ideological dispositive that hails global capitalism’s sensitivity towards diversity. Within the critical camp itself it remains an open question whether the aim is primarily to deconstruct categories or to explain social mechanisms. The project would like to contribute to the theoretical and methodological elaboration of intersectionality as well as to its deepening relations with critical realism. It is directed both towards empirical research and theoretical aspects. Among the questions to be addressed are: How can intersectionality be operationalised within concrete research? What does it render particularly apt for interdisciplinary analysis? How can complexity and complexity reduction, especially in the investigation of multiple intersecting inequalities, be mediated? What role does global capitalism play within intersectional analysis? What is the contribution of intersectionality to a broader critical social theory? What can critical realism learn from intersectional perspectives? How could an emancipatory politics of intersectionality look like