Applying intersectionality in practice

Introduction

This section aims to help you use the lens of intersectionality in your interactions with adults and carers and methods of putting intersectionality into action. 

Applying intersectionality in practice

Using intersectionality to raise consciousness and build understanding is a key part of anti-oppressive practice. For example, people in need of care and support can become convinced that the problem is them and not the landscape they inhabit; they can become so used to a particular context that they lose sight of where the issues are really located. Intersectionality enables people in need of care and support and practitioners together to grasp someone’s context, name what is happening and respond effectively. This raises awareness that the issues and barriers are contextual, which can promote people’s control over their own life.  

Intersectional encounters start with intersectional curiosity. Using intersectional listening can help practitioners to join the dots between different bits of situated knowledge. It’s important that the practitioner is conscious of their own position and holds off judging from their own viewpoint, instead seeking to understand the situated view of the other. The practitioner can use different lenses to examine, alongside the person, the different aspects of their situation. For example, the person might talk about experiences related to their family background or social position. Exploring the information for connecting threads: the practitioner looks for interdependency between different aspects of the person’s life, identity and context. At the right pace and time for the person, the practitioner can put a name to what they hear, and move gradually from the general to the specific. This helps the person to have language to express their experience.  

Intersectionality offers a method of reflective analysis. When working with someone, we can use the analogy of them standing at an intersection to: 

1. Name the roads of inequity.  

2. Name the vehicles of oppression on the roads. 

3. Describe the crash. 

4. Describe the bio-psycho-social injury. (Nayak, 2022)

This provides a basis for exploring with the person:  

• What has happened?  
• What ongoing barriers do they face? 
• What strengths have they developed that they can use to change things? 
• What can they co-produce with the practitioner to help them overcome injuries and achieve outcomes?  

The intersection analogy repositions the cause of the problem away from the person and to the context they are in, thereby enabling more holistic understanding, analysis and action.

Use these tools below to:

• Consider how you can have intersectional conversations with adults and carers.
• Enable you to draw out the intersecting experiences of adults and carers.

Use the examples of Maggie, Pra and Jack to consider intersectionality in practice.

Inter-professional practice

Adult social care is a multi-professional, multi-agency, multi-disciplinary sector. As we develop our understanding of intersectionality and how we can use it to promote equity, we will encounter the need to influence others.  

Categorising people gives a partial and distorting picture (Crenshaw, 1989). This is made worse by different people in different roles and agencies seeing only part of the person – for example, attending to their nursing needs or housing needs only. The social care practitioner can adopt the key role of countering the reductive trend to compartmentalise a person’s life into discrete areas, so that the whole person can become visible instead – with their history, their situated knowledge and their hopes for the future.  

This involves understanding how different professions and agencies view people as a result of the situated knowledge they hold. What is their role, professional focus and knowledge base? How will these influence the way in which they see someone and the parts of the picture that they have? It’s important to explore these questions in discussions with people from different agencies and professions. Joint learning opportunities can be a particularly helpful way of doing this. Positive professional relationships can challenge partial and distorting pictures. What this looks like in practice, and who would be involved, will look different in each situation, but these principles can help:  

• Working together, with the person at the centre, to build up a complete picture of the person’s identity, experience and context, with their situated knowledge at the centre of all discussions and interventions, to ensure an intersectional holistic response.
• As an ally, asking intersectionally curious questions about how power, privilege, discrimination and inequity interplay in the person’s life, and agreeing what each profession and agency will do to counter this.

Use this tool below to consider how you can use intersectionality when you engage with other professionals.

Examples: Using intersectionality in practice

In the Change Project, we discussed examples of how practitioners are using intersectionality in their work. Here’s what some of the participants had to say: