A Synthesis Of Intersectionality Theory And Institutional...

Research Contexts My theoretical framework is a synthesis of intersectionality theory and institutional ethnography. Intersectionality, vastly simplified, outlines the ways in which individuals’ multiple social positions are transformative rather than additive, and how those who are marginalized by class, race, gender and sexuality experience those structures in combination. Such research also seeks to challenge inequity (Nuà ±ez 2014). Multiple scholars have taken up this concept that comes out of black lesbian feminist thought and use it to understand how social structures create unique subject positions that are often characterized by simultaneous privileged and marginalized identities, now expanded to include categories such as disability as well as studies of privilege. Institutional ethnography considers institutional organization as it is constituted through the textual as well as constitutive of individual lived experience, emphasizing the discursive nature of organizational practices . The social construction of subjects by institutions (such as Smith College), found in its memos and bureaucratic measures, precedes and makes possible the interaction between the two (Smith 2002). Inequalities among groups of students, then, are reproduced and created by the college. Nuà ±ez (2014) seeks to advance a model of intersectional education research that, like institutional ethnography, seeks to study the relationships between identity or the individual and other levels of