The “7 Up” Intersectionality Life Grid: A Tool for Reflexive Practice

Abstract

Feminist epistemology ensures women’s ways of seeing are central to research purpose and process. In particular, feminist standpoint theory, including Black feminist standpoint theory, recognizes epistemic privilege. Situated knowledge, what is known and the ways it can be known, is shaped by the positionality of knowledge producers in studying upwards to expose oppressive social structures. A reflexive approach prompts feminist researchers to reflect deeply on the situation and perspective of their position in relation to the focus of research. The research process with women school leaders of diverse heritages led the author to re-examine her personal and professional story, as well as her scholarship, as a white woman of working class origins, raised, educated, and working in education as an educator, school leader, initial teacher educator, educational leadership and management programme leader, and scholar in the UK. The author developed a heuristic device for reflection as a “7 Up” intersectionality life grid to think about her life in education at 7 year intervals in relation to the experience of learning, educating, leading, and researching in the context of unequal gender, class, and race relations in wider society. The process revealed white supremacy, white privilege, and white fragility in her lived reality and scholarship. This re-examination enabled her to deepen understanding of her positionality and position-taking as it relates to work in the field of women, gender, and educational leadership. In this critically reflexive autoethnography, I report on reflections guided by the 7 year intervals of the “7 Up” framework at nine points (birth to 56 years old) as reflexivities of complacency, reflexivities that discomfort and reflexivities that transform. Following feminist theorists who think with and against Bourdieu’s social theory, I draw on the concepts of misrecognition and symbolic violence, and for the first time in work on intersectionality in educational leadership, hysteresis to theorize about complicity with white supremacy, the accrual of white privilege and examples of white fragility. The “7 Up” intersectionality life grid tool has capacity to prompt the critically reflective and transformative self-narrative work essential to feminist scholars. It is also a valuable tool for critical reflexivity among women and men students, educators, leaders, and learners of diverse heritages across national contexts. Engaging with reflexivities that discomfort has the potential to transform self-narratives, construct relationships, and carry out and interpret research differently.