"Because of My Research and Because I’m Latina”: Intersectionalizing Identities in BIPOC Research Interviews

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Navigating Language, Identity, and Power

Abstract

Inspired by a need for more interactional scholarship on the practices through which people construct intersectional identities and meanings, this discourse analysis combines intersectional perspectives on race and racialization with interactional perspectives on intersectionality and identity to examine how racialized graduate students, faculty, and researchers jointly construct intersectional identities in focus group and interview interactions within a larger study on racialization in a Canadian university. Focusing on (1) how interlocutors multimodally construct intersectionality through their interactions and (2) what such constructions accomplish, the analysis reveals a complex range of actions accomplished through participants' intersectionalization practices. These findings have a number of implications, particularly for countering majoritarian caricatures that depict racialized people as wielding intersectionality as a weapon.

Authors

• Meghan Corella, University of British Columbia

• Ryuko Kubota, University of British Columbia

• Kyu Yun Lim, University of British Columbia

• Rosa Dene David, University of British Columbia