ISI 2027: Program & Facilitators

Before ISI

You'll be receiving

• An edited, recorded training on Intersectionality by Lisa Bowleg, PhD, MA to review before ISI
• A list of recommended readings for each session
• Information to support your travel, transport, accommodation and attendance at ISI
• Access to a digital, private space where you can chat to other attendees, receive all materials, and prepare for ISI

Monday Morning

Ask Me Anything (AMA) about Intersectionality
with Professor Lisa Bowleg

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A Framework for Applied Intersectionality Research (FAIR)
with Professor Lisa Bowleg

Ask 10 people to define intersectionality and you’ll likely get at least 20 different answers. To ensure that ISI 2026 participants are on the same page with how we at the Intersectionality Training Institute® (ITI) conceptualize intersectionality and its application to research, policy, and practice, this session will discuss the provided overview of intersectionality’s history and core themes, define it, and highlight its benefits for health equity and other social justice projects.

And in an era when the words “intersectionality” and “intersectional” are two of 197 terms that might trigger an automatic rejection of your grant application, this session will invite you to envision a path forward for your intersectionality work and fortify your commitment to doing transformative intersectionality work.

Although the (written) history of what intersectionality scholar, Ange-Marie Hancock calls “intersectionality-related thought” is almost 200-years old, the application of intersectionality to social and behavioral science research is nascent. Case in point: Leslie McCall’s (2005) Complexity of Intersectionality, one of the first articles to describe the methodological challenges of intersectionality, is just 20-years old.

Mindful of the reality that intersectionality was developed for activism, not research, this session prioritizes FAIR,©, a framework designed to help researchers interested in applying intersectionality to their research projects prioritize intersectionality “… as critical praxis [that] sheds light on the doing of social justice,” (Collins, 2015, p. 16) not just another analytical or methodological tool.

Lisa Bowleg, PhD, MA is the Founder and CEO of the Intersectionality Training Institute and a leading scholar of the application of intersectionality to social behavioral science health equity research and practice.

Monday Afternoon

Intersectional Interventions
with Professor Gary Harper

Intersectional intervention development is, well, complicated.  Why? Because for starters, intersectionality disrupts the notion that it is possible (or even desirable) to develop an effective one-size fits all intervention.   There are considerable gaps in the literature about what it means to develop an intersectional intervention, something that Gary (ISI 2024), has thought a lot about given his expertise with various community-based HIV interventions for LGBTQ+ populations in the U.S. and Africa.  Using the Intervention Mapping (IM) Framework, an interactive and systematic approach for developing theory-based interventions as a foundation,  Gary will describe the most important things you need to know and consider to design an intersectionality-informed intervention.

Gary W. Harper, Ph.D., M.P.H. is an Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Professor of Health Behavior and Health Equity, and Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Gary is trained as both a Clinical Psychologist (but identifies as a Community Psychologist) and an Epidemiologist. Dr. Harper’s work focuses primarily on intersectional intervention development, joining with  He utilizes critical qualitative and mixed-methods research strategies to ensure that the resulting collaborative community interventions are centered on the lived realities of LGBTQ+ people.

Tuesday Morning

Qualitative Intersectionality Research Methods: Foundations & Fundamentals
with Professor Lisa Bowleg

Whether you are a seasoned qualitative researcher, novice, or consider yourself to be exclusively quantitative, this session is designed to provide you with a solid foundational overview of qualitative research in general, and qualitative intersectionality research, in particular.

We'll begin with a brief review of some of the shared philosophical assumptions that link intersectionality and qualitative research, highlight what’s distinctive about qualitative intersectionality research, and highlight some of the key theoretical and methodological underpinnings of qualitative intersectionality research.

We then focus on 5 methodological considerations, and highlight some of the most important things you need to know about doing qualitative intersectionality research in terms of:

(1) conceptualization and design;
(2) choosing an appropriate methodology;
(3) sampling;
(4) measurement; and
(5) analysis and interpretation.

Tuesday Afternoon

Quantitative Intersectionality Research Methods: Foundations and Fundamentals
with Stephanie Cook, DrPH, MPH

We begin with the foundational  issues you need to know about quantitative intersectionality research such as the benefits (and challenges), descriptive vs. analytic approaches, and an overview of anticategorical, intracategorical, and intercategorical complexity approaches.

As the Director of the Attachment and Health Disparities Research Lab (AHDL), Dr. Cook leads a team of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in exploring innovative ways to mitigate the impact of stress on health. She has developed an integrated model combining adult attachment theory and stress research to better understand how relational factors influence health outcomes for individuals facing social disadvantage. Her long-term goal is to develop and implement sustainable interventions aimed at reducing the harmful effects of stress on health, with a focus on improving health equity.

Wednesday Morning

Qualitative Intersectionality Research Methods: Applications
with Professor Lisa Bowleg

It’s one thing to talk about the foundations and fundamentals of qualitative intersectionality research.  It’s an entirely different thing to apply what you’ve learned to a project that you’re working on.

This session is the place to apply what you’ve learned thus far to the qualitative project that you brought to ISI (e.g., interview guide, developing a sampling frame, mapping out an analytical strategy, coding) and get feedback on it.

If you don’t have a project, not a problem.  You can use the time to design one.  We’ll also have some sample practice qualitative data for you to work with.

Wednesday Afternoon

Quantitative Intersectionality Research Methods: Applications
with Dr. Stephanie Cook

It’s one thing to talk about the foundations and fundamentals of qualitative intersectionality research.  It’s an entirely different thing to apply what you’ve learned to a project that you’re working on.

This session is the place to apply what you’ve learned thus far to the qualitative project that you brought to ISI (e.g., interview guide, developing a sampling frame, mapping out an analytical strategy, coding) and get feedback on it.

If you don’t have a project, not a problem.  You can use the time to design one.  We’ll also have some sample practice qualitative data for you to work with.

Thursday Morning

Intersectional Mixed Methods
with Professor Bowleg

Although mixed methods research is very popular, theory and research in intersectionality mixed methods research has lagged for some reason. Professor Patricia Hill Collins, in writing about additive relational frameworks asks: what happens when you add intersectionality to a new field.

This is the guiding question we will pose in this session. Heads up on the answer: LOTS! Lisa will provide an overview of IMMR, describe different designs, and provide some tips and guidelines about what any IMMR project should include at a minimum.

Thursday Morning

Getting Structural: The Important Things to Know About Structural Quantitative Intersectionality Research (SQIR)
with Ariel Beccia, PhD and Dougie Zubizarreta, PhDc

Interlocking systems and structures of power and oppression are a core focus of intersectionality, but to date most quantitative intersectionality research has focused on the individual-level rather than the structural-level.  This field-advancing session fills a critical gap in the field of quantitative intersectionality research.

Specifically, it builds on Zubizaretta and Beccia’s excellent 2025 Social, Science and Medicine article, “Quantitative  approaches to structural intersectionality research: Conceptual and methodologic considerations” This session will highlight why structural approaches focused on the joint impacts of structural discrimination are so essential to health equity research, and describe some best practice considerations for doing structural intersectionality research.

Ariel L. Beccia, PhD (she/her) is a Research Scientist in the Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. A social epidemiologist by training, her research focuses on understanding the social and structural determinants of eating disorder inequities, with a particular focus on inequities affecting LGBTQ+ youth. She also regularly collaborates on projects examining the drivers of mental health inequities more broadly and has a strong interest in integrating causal inference, econometric, and other advanced quantitative methods into this line of work.

Dougie Zubizarreta (he/they) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They are a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on conceptualizing, measuring, and analyzing the impacts of structural forms of discrimination on population health and inequities. He is particularly interested in applying advanced quantitative methods and an intersectional lens to this area of research.

Thursday Afternoon

Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) or I-MAIHDA (where the I stands for intersectional).  If you’re passionate about quantitative intersectionality research, you likely already know about MAIHDA.  MAIHDA is an innovative quantitative approach for examining intersectional health, socioeconomic, psychosocial, disease inequalities and inequities.

This session will be split.

The Beginning/Intermediate MAIHDA session with Dr. Beccia and Mr. Zubizarreta. will be the default choice.

If you wish to attend the Advanced MAIHDA Application session with Dr. Clare Evans, you must nominate for that session in your application, and you will be asked to provide a short summary of you work with MAIHDA to date.

Dr. Clare Evans invented MAIHDA for her 2015 Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health dissertation research proposal.  Yep, you read that correctly: she invented it! MAIHDA is now the “gold standard” for intersectional research in social epidemiology and is rapidly growing with the other social sciences.

Since then, Evans,  a social epidemiologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon,  has written prolifically about the benefits and limitations of MAIHDA.

Friday Morning

Dr. Evans,  a social epidemiologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon,  has written prolifically about the benefits and limitations of MAIHDA.  Her 2019 Social Science and Medicine article, “Adding Interactions to Models of Intersectional Health Inequalities: Comparing Multilevel and Conventional Methods” has more than 100 Google Scholar citations.  Her 2024, co-authored MAIHDA tutorial, published in SSM-Population Health is mandatory reading for anyone interested in this method.

One of the most impressive aspects of Evans’ groundbreaking work advancing MAIHDA is her admonition that researchers who use MAIHDA be mindful about not privileging discrimination accuracy over structural explanations of inequity, or decontextualize core tenets of intersectionality such as social inequality, power and social context.

Friday Afternoon

Remember that project that you brought with you? What does it look like now? Theoretically stronger and methodologically stronger? More aligned with FAIR? And what are some of the areas that still need attention? The goal of this session is to invite you to share how your project has evolved over the last 5 days.

We’re calling this session “The Great Evolution” because it’s an opportunity for you to reflect on what you’ve learned this week, how your project has evolved over the last 5 days, and what comes next (e.g., what are some of the things that you’ll likely revise, add, or delete to advance this work. Please come prepared to share the “then and now” of your project with the group. We’re excited to hear about your evolution.

There's Even More!