Interlocking Systems Of Oppression Research Articles

Discussing Sensitive Issues through a Partnership Lens: A Conversation with My Teenaged Son

This article explores parenting and the construction of masculinity through the lens of Partnership. Framed by the author’s conversation with her teenaged son, the paper opens with a definition, exploration, and cultural contextualization of androcracy. Fundamental intersections between the disciplines of the Partnership Model and Women’s Spirituality are then introduced, locating story and storytelling, spirit, and relationship as cornerstones for shifting from the Domination Model to a Partnership Model. Interconnected theories and praxes of feminism, radical feminism, womanism, and the Womanist Idea, as well as the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, are defined and proposed as tools for educating children about the Domination/Control and interlocking systems of oppression we live in, and how to enact Partnership/Respect principles in our relationships. The paper proposes that through sharing and enacting a multiplicity of counter narratives that reflect the tenets of Partnership, parents and care givers not only actively model for children Partnership values, but they also equip children with an explicit understanding of the harmful systems we live in and the means to challenge and shift them. Highlighting a multiplicity of traditions that share the same core values of empathy, compassion, and care for all living beings, the paper concludes with a set of tools for employing foundational precepts of Partnership Parenting, from sharing story to embodying and promoting ways to care for self, community, and the world.

Incorporating intersectionality into psychology: An opportunity to promote social justice and equity.

Intersectionality is receiving increasing attention in many fields, including psychology. This theory or framework has its roots in the work of Black feminist scholar-activists, and it focuses on interlocking systems of oppression and the need to work toward structural-level changes to promote social justice and equity. Thus, the current interest in intersectionality in psychology presents an opportunity to draw psychologists' attention more to structural-level issues and to make social justice and equity more central agendas to the field. The large, ever-growing bodies of research demonstrating the wide-ranging adverse consequences of structural- and interpersonal-level oppression, inequality, and stigma for the health and well-being of many diverse groups of people support that these issues are central to the field of psychology. We as individual psychologists and the field as a whole can work to fully incorporate the insights of intersectionality and therefore contribute to making social justice and equity more central across the varied subfields and realms of our work. Specific ways that we can do this are to (a) engage and collaborate with communities, (b) address and critique societal structures, (c) work together/build coalitions, (d) attend to resistance in addition to resilience, and (e) teach social justice curricula. There are important examples both within and outside of psychology that can guide us in achieving these goals. These suggestions are meant to foster conversation and consideration by psychologists across all subfields and areas of focus. (PsycINFO Database Record

Shifting Paradigms to Better Serve Twice-Exceptional African-American Learners

Existing research on students with twice-exceptional abilities concentrates on strategies to improve the educational experiences of individuals who demonstrate the comorbid presence of a talent for high academic achievement (often considered a strength) and a disability (often considered a weakness). However, this body of work typically excludes the sociocultural context in which these abilities manifest and how the current deficit perspective of ability infringes upon an appropriate education for African-American students with twice-exceptional abilities. Using Hill Collins’ (2008) Interlocking Systems of Oppression as a framework, we expound on the discourse about twice-exceptional abilities specific to African-American students with a focus on African-American males. We present a case study about the impact deficit perspectives have on identifying and supporting twice-exceptional abilities in African-American students. Recommendations are made to improve the conditions in which twice-exceptional abilities among African-Americans are identified and supported in schools.

Using the Five Faces of Oppression to Teach About Interlocking Systems of Oppression

In social justice education a tension sometimes emerges between the complex ideas we want participants to grapple with and the relatively straightforward activities we use to communicate those ideas. We adapt learning activities to meet participants’ evolving needs and to communicate emerging theories and analyses, but sometimes adjusting an activity's content is not enough; the activity's very structure can contradict our stated frameworks and undermine the content we wish to convey. In this article I explore two activities commonly used for teaching about systems of oppression whose structures inadvertently support linear, single-issue thinking, and largely fail to account for intersectionality, despite educators’ best efforts to incorporate more complex content. I describe an alternative activity, structured around Iris Marion Young's The Five Faces of Oppression, that can be used to teach about multiple, interlocking systems of oppression while highlighting rather than obscuring the specificity of interrelationships among those systems.

Dealing with Difference in Desistance Theory: The Promise of Intersectionality for New Avenues of Inquiry

AbstractThe last two decades have witnessed a rapid growth in research and theorizing about the desistance process, namely the causal mechanisms behind the termination or slowing of offending that frequently accompany adulthood. This flurry of scholarly activity has been spurred by both the ascendance of the life course paradigm of criminology, which examines patterns of criminal offending over the life span, but also by the very real practical demands of supporting the transitions of over 700,000 former prisoners released to their communities each year.The field of desistance theory has expanded upon its original formulations that were largely (although not exclusively) based on White males and has recently turned to examining (1) the potential invariance of desistance processes for members of other groups and (2) the unique experiences of reentry and pathways to desistance for sub‐groups. In this essay, we review these recent developments, particularly as they relate to women, persons of color, and incarcerated youth. Finally, we turn to the intersectionality framework, which examines the social location of individuals within interlocking systems of oppression (e.g., race, class, gender, age, sexual orientation, and ability, among others). We conclude with some suggestions for how intersectionality could be used to expand the conceptual and practical boundaries of research on desistance and reentry.

Writing Trojan Horses and War Machines: The creative political in music education research

North American music education is a commodity sold to pre‐service and in‐service music teachers. Like all mass‐produced consumables, it is valuable to the extent that it is not creative, that is, to the extent that it is reproducible. This is demonstrated in curricular materials, notably general music series textbook and music scores available from a rapidly shrinking cadre of publishers, as well as rigid and pre‐determined pedagogical practices. Distributing resources and techniques that produce predicable, consistent, and repeatable goods and services, the economy of music teacher preparation and development must necessarily exclude creativity, which consequently must be viewed as not only inefficient but unprofitable. More than undesirable, however, creativity is constructed as dangerous as it injects difference in a system that relies on sameness. Because of its implications for music education discourse and practices, I focus my discussion on research in general and feminist critique in particular in music education. Reading through Monique Wittig's ‘The Trojan Horse’ as literary war machine, I argue that creative writing and academic research are not mutually exclusive, and that it is only through infusing the literary or creative in scholarly writing that interlocking systems of oppression may be altered and difference implicated in music education. My analysis of Roberta Lamb's (1995) research piece, ‘Tone Deaf/Symphonies Singing: Sketches for a Musicale’ depicts it as Trojan Horse, albeit one that Lamb herself, most likely as a function of editorial imperative, hobbles.

Introduction: Special Issue on Black and Latina Sexuality and Identities

Black feminist theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw (1989, 1991) and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) have challenged researchers to expand their thinking when examining issues of sexism, racism, and classism. Their main focus of untying the interlocking systems of oppression has been groundbreaking, liberating, and not without controversy. In short, defining, documenting, and destroying human suffering is much easier said than done. Subsequent contributors to Crenshaw’s and Collins’s work have added sexuality (among other variables) to this timely and all-too-important investigatory agenda (for examples, see Brewer 1993 and McCall 2005). Further, some have drawn on various bodies of scholarship—historical, social scientific, and literary—to reveal the multiple and intersecting social forces that have shaped the “place” for sexual minorities (for a review, see Battle and Bennett 2005). In addition to exploring the pioneering work of Crenshaw and Collins, other scholars have actually expanded it. Consider, for example, the intersectional imagination (Pastrana 2006), a term used to describe the analytic process that occurs when examining individualand group-level oppressions based on identity. Starting with an understanding that individuals and groups are more than the sum of their parts, that each individual characteristic or constituent has the capacity to affect different outcomes, the intersectional imagination attempts to describe the ways that identities come together and are pulled apart. The articles in this collection address not only individual-level issues but also macro-level ones. Across the articles, researchers wrestle with how race, class, gender, sexuality, and a myriad of other variables work to oppress as

Uprooted and Displaced: A Critical Narrative Study of Homeless, Aboriginal, and Newcomer Girls in Canada

Uprooting and displacement are a common part of everyday life for millions of girls and young women throughout the world. While much of the discourse has centered on movement from one country to another, uprooting and displacement are also a reality for many within Canada. Notably, a growing population of homeless girls and Aboriginal girls also have experienced uprooting and dislocation from home, community, and in some cases, family. For many of these girls, multiple forms of individual and systemic violence are central features of their lives. The primary purpose of this critical narrative study is to examine how uprooting and displacement have shaped mental health among three groups: (1) newcomers to Canada (immigrant and refugee girls); (2) homeless girls; and (3) Aboriginal girls. In-depth narrative interviews were conducted with 19 girls in Southwestern Ontario. Narrative themes revealed that although there is much diversity within and between these groups, uprooting and displacement create social boundaries and profound experiences of disconnections in relationships. Barriers to re/establishing connections generate dangerous spaces within interlocking systems of oppression. However, in negotiating new spaces, there is the potential for the forming and re-forming of alliances where sources of support hold the promise of hope. It is within these spaces of hope and pathways of engagement where connections offer a renewed sense of belonging and well-being. The findings highlight the relevance of the construct of uprootedness in girls' lives, provide beginning directions for the design of gender-specific and culturally meaningful interventions, and comprise a substantial contribution to the growing body of research related to girls and young women.

Gender and Exceptionality in North-South Interventions: Reflecting on Relations

In this article I share my reflections on a normative research dilemma that has led to my journeying towards greater awareness of the ways in which white, feminist subjects participate in the perpetuation of racial domination on a global scale. To this end, I offer a reflection within a reflection, beginning with a choice that arose regarding undertaking part of my doctoral research in Africa. Drawing on my earlier experiences in a Women’s Programme in Zambia over a period of several years, I examine the origins of assumptions underlying both my more recent research dilemma and my previous engagement with gender issues in Africa. These are: a sense of entitlement on my part, and presumed availability on the part of African people in respect to my interventions. I then consider whether a more nuanced, situated feminism as articulated in Gender and Development theory would have changed these assumptions. In conclusion, I propose that, while feminism does not offer a ‘passport’ through the imperial relations of the North—South binary, a focus on interlocking systems of oppression may produce a more transformative effect than seems possible through Gender and Development approaches.