Negotiating with Intersectional Consciousness: Women leaders, everyday advocacy and doing intersectionality in India

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Intersectional Activism

Abstract

Intersectionality is manifested in multidimensional ways through the interplay of structural boundaries and strategies of negotiation in everyday activism, affecting outcomes. This study focuses on how intersectional identities of grassroots women leaders strategically interact with structural boundaries of religion, gender, and caste to negotiate using both positions of intersectional advantage and disadvantage and conduct advocacy work in communities. The concept of intersectional consciousness is introduced as a tool for mobilization success, where leaders channel their awareness on individual positionality to strategically navigate intervention challenges to maximize positive outcomes within the existing structural constraints. Ultimately, the study findings contribute to how global social movement organizations can use the knowledge of lived experiences of intersectionality during everyday activism as an effective tool for mobilization.

Authors

• Soma Chaudhuri, Michigan State University

• Alison Colby, East Carolina University