Intersectionalia
Volume 1, Number 10
December 10, 2024
My wall calendar reads December already. Yours? Ordinarily, December finds me lamenting how fast time has flown. Not this year. For me, the fall has just dragged like an exhausted marathoner lumbering towards the finish line. I suspect that this has something to do with the election; that there is a part of me that wants to savor each lasting moment in whatever will be left of our “democracy.” I’m bracing for the worst. I recommend you do too. But wait, I’m starting this off way more despondingly than intended. Let’s try this again.
This last newsletter of the year is coming to you from Scottsdale, AZ. An invitation to travel here to speak about my career trajectory piqued my interest primarily because the address was to early career faculty and in a state that I had not yet visited and one that boasted warm weather in December. It’s not lost on me that I have arrived at that stage in life where invitations to reflect on my career, rather than what I’m working on now have become a thing. It’s up there with the print on the back of the Advil bottles that I can no longer read without a magnifying glass, the menopausal hair thinning that no one bothered to tell me about, and the 5pm is the perfect time for a dinner reservation phenomenon. Live long enough and these things just sneak up on you.
Anyway, ever since I visited New Mexico—Santa Fe, specifically—for our Intersectionality Policymaking Toolkit project a few years ago and found myself totally besotted with Santa Fe’s energy, art scene, and topography, I’ve longed to return to the Southwest. Tomorrow, we leave for Sedona, from which we will later journey to the Grand Canyon.
The thought of viewing two magnificent craters within the same year—we lodged on the rim of and toured Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater in May—is intriguing. Of course, it strikes me that my newfound interest in craters is a metaphor for my hope for the U.S.: cratered. But I digress.

Our view of Ngorongoro Crater, Ngorongoro District, Tanzania
We’ll return home for a few days and then it’s off to The Bahamas for the holidays. Listen, I know people get envious whenever I mention my Nassau travel plans. I always hasten to add, “Um yes, but my family lives there too.” By this I mean that you can be in paradise and still have your relatives drive you right to the edge of madness. Within days you find yourself longing for the moment you hear the pilot on the return trip speak those dreaded words: “The temperature in Philadelphia today is 32 degrees.”
Eventually, we all must return home. Thus, amidst all the talk about leaving the U.S. to escape what awaits us politically in 2025 is this stark reality: most of us cannot afford to purchase citizenship by investment packages in the hundreds of thousands, pack up everything you own, and head overseas until (if) this political mess subsides. That is, unless you happen to share a tax bracket with Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi, who by way of People Magazine (Have I ever told y’all how much I love People Magazine?), I learned recently sold their Los Angeles home for $96 million and are moving to a UK countryside home that Ellen fell in love with when she was house hunting in October.
This means, settle in Intersectionality Training Institute family, we are all going to be here in 2025 getting each other through this chaotic, fearful, and vexing new normal as best we can. For ITI this means carrying on like we have been. Our commitment to social justice and health equity are unwavering no matter the turn of the political tide. I invite you to root even more firmly into your moral and ethical cores too. You lose those, and indeed you have lost everything.
Here’s what ITI has on tap for you in 2025:
- Intersectionalia will become quarterly as of January 2025. My husband will tell you that I never listen to him. He’s Invariably though, I circle back months later with an earnest, “I should have listened to you.” This is to say, when I told him last year that ITI (aka I) would be producing a monthly newsletter, he replied: “Make it quarterly.” And well, y’all know what happened next. I’m terribly proud of having produced 10 issues of Intersectionalia. I’m even prouder of how many of you have warmly received this newsletter. A decent open rate for a newsletter is somewhere in the 28% range. Open rates for Intersectionalia have ranged from a low of 32.2% to a high of 66.4%! I was grateful for you opening it alone, but when on top of that several of you took the time to text or email a compliment about something you read? Oh, how that delighted me! A heartfelt thank you. Alas, because the ITI is still very much a startup, we do not yet have the resources needed to produce this monthly without damn near killing ourselves to make it happen. We will need to harness all of our energy in 2025 and so as of January 2025, quarterly Intersectionalia shall be. I trust that you understand.
- We are moving full steam ahead with the Intersectionality Collective, our new online community on the Circle platform. We are crazy excited about it!We’re hoping that it will be one of your favorite new ITI spots. We also figure, given what’s coming down the pike politically in 2025 and beyond that a private space to find community, to ask and get answers to questions about all things intersectionality, identify mentors and collaborators, discuss what you’re working on, bemoan current events, share resources and strategies, and support each other will be even more valuable than it was when we conceived the You will be the first to know when The Intersectionality Collective is ready to welcome you.
- Writing retreats!!! Yes, yes! The ITI will be rolling out at least two new writing retreats next year. The first, set for July 2025, will be at The Osprey in Great Harbour Cay (GHC) in the Berry Islands, Bahamas. GHC is one my favorite places on the planet and the island that I visit every summer. This first writing retreat is luxurious and exclusive (just four cottages) and ahem, for those with generous discretionary accounts or start-up funds. You can find all of the enticing details here. The second will be sometime in the fall at my beloved Easton’s Nook, but also exclusive in the sense that there will be just 5 spots available. And the third one, a collaboration with Jasmine Abrams, PhD , CEO of Thrive Institutes for Professional Development will likely be in either Mexico or Belize in January 2026. It bears repeating: if you’re reading this, you will be among the first to know when we roll those out.
- Last but by no means least, we’re rolling out a new all day virtual training on the most important things you need to know to conduct quantitative intersectionality researchin alignment with core themes of intersectionality. ITI consultant, the brilliant Tiara Willie, PhD, MA will facilitate this training in fall 2025. We’re also cooking up some other interesting things on the quantitative intersectionality research front that we will certainly keep you in the loop about.
So, this brings me to my most fervent wish for each of you this holiday season. I wish that you will make (you won’t find it, you have to make it) time to rest, to do things that bring you joy (when I return home, it’s going to be jigsaw puzzles, reading for pleasure, and I hope, lots and lots of naps), and to practice gratitude with nearly every breath—in spite of it all, we all have so much to be grateful for. Be sure also to make time to laugh and to protect your peace as if your lives depended on it. If reading the news or being on social media is making you anxious, fearful, and crazy, cease and desist. You have only one precious life, guard it as such. Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas. Happy Kwanzaa. Happy Holidays.
Sincerely,
Lisa Bowleg, PhD, MA
Founder & President, Intersectionality Training Institute
P.S. For those of you wondering, “Hey, where’s the rest of the newsletter?” Remember how in the first issue of Intersectionalia, I told you that Intersectionalia would be like going to your favorite restaurant in which you’d never know which combination of things would be on the menu? This issue in which we combined Musings and Marginalia with ITI Happenings, is just that. We’ll be back with more in January; promise.