ECMI Workshop 2/0223 2023 : Workshop - Minority Women and Intersectionality: A Renewed Research Agenda?

Intersectionality, within a European academic context, has been widely used both as a theory of identity as well as a method to analyze processes of power and inequality. It has also been referred to as a paradigm, a human rights policy, a statistical tool, and a political project, among others. The development of the concept has led to numerous attempts to map complex identities, emphasizing how social identity markers such as race, ethnic origin, gender, religion, class, sexuality, and others are experienced in relation to each other.

From a minority perspective, intersectionality has been emphasizing the particular vulnerability of minority women and the multiple barriers that they face in realizing their rights. Rooted within international legal discourse, it was devised primarily to respond to inequalities but, given its firm footing in law, has remained less comprehensive and efficient when faced with the complex and sophisticated processes of discrimination. This has been noted in the context of minority women most characteristically when examining conditions of conflict between cultural and religious practices of minority groups deemed discriminatory with minority and human rights.

In broader terms, however, intersectionality remains useful to understand the dynamics of social divisions and lines of exclusion but also the possibilities to create spaces for solidarity, resistance, and transformation. With this duality in mind, the present workshop will explore how minority women ‘do difference’ both to resist exclusion but also to empower themselves. While we encourage research on members of all minority groups, we are also looking to consider intersectionality within specific national contexts which cannot be, however, considered as entirely disconnected or isolated from global geopolitics. These linkages will allow us to build both historical but also contemporary bridges between the theory and the politics of intersectionality.

So has intersectionality reached its limits for minority women? To discuss the implications of intersectionality as a sub-field of minority studies, we invite contributions that, based on this fundamental though general question, focus, among others, on:

intersectionality as an anti-essentialist concept that emphasizes dissimilarities but that may also have exclusionary effects;
intersectionality as a shifting concept across time and geographical locations;
intersectionality as a relational concept vis-à-vis race, gender, culture, socioeconomic status, ethnic origin, etc.;
intersectionality through self-narratives that connect the structural with one’s sense of being (e.g. through agency, motivations, identity);
intersectionality as a process of exclusion (rather than as an outcome);
the form/manifestation, circumstances, and consequences of intersectionality for minority women;
intersectionality and its implications for the multiple identities of minority women.
The aim of the workshop will be to re-draw a research agenda on intersectionality from a minority perspective. Based on both theoretical but also empirical contributions, we will build a collective publication on the basis of this agenda, where the discourses of women are studied in conjunction with broader political discourses (e.g., far-right, populist, anti-fundamentalist, assimilationist), emphasizing how these sets of discourses are produced, experienced and eventually resisted.

Abstracts (500 words max.) should be sent by 22 May 2023 to Jody Metcalfe.

Selected abstracts will be invited for a presentation at the event hosted by the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg (Germany) during a workshop on 10-11 July 2023.

Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered by the organizers.