Intersectionalia
Volume 1, Number 5
May 2, 2024
My God, what a stunningly beautiful country! The Bahamas, I mean. What country did you think I meant? I’m writing this from Nassau where I flew in to surprise my mother for her 80th birthday. What an inspiration to see my mom so healthy, vibrant, active, and fierce at 80! If the inanity of U.S. politics and everybody-gets-a gun culture don’t kill me, it looks like I may have inherited the genetic lottery. At 83, my father is also healthy and prone to physical feats that would saddle most octogenarians.

Nassau is where I was born, raised, and lived until I left for college in the U.S. And yes, I identify as and treasure my identity as an immigrant. Among my many privileges is the ability to visit family and friends in The Bahamas at least twice a year. Leaving is always bittersweet. The April weather was perfection; think Jill Scott’s Love Rain (Coffee Shop Mix): “… nice and warm, no jacket, no umbrella, just warm.” On the day you leave, no matter the time of year, you will depart under full 80-degree sunny skies. It stings like a taunt.
Visions of Nassau’s natural beauty lingers, but so do two conversations that I had while there. Both focus on the complexity of identity. “Intersectionality is not just about identities. Everyone has multiple intersectional identities.” I’ve said or written this more times than I can count. Moreover, I rarely invoke the word identities in my intersectional work unless I purposefully intend it. Intersectionality is fundamentally about power that accrues (or not) to historically marginalized intersectional positions or identities. If you’re talking about identities absent attention to interlocking power relations, you’re not talking about or doing intersectionality; you’re simply talking multiple identities. Cool, I guess, but don’t call it intersectionality.
But back to those two conversations. The first happened at dinner with my beloved sister and 14-year-old niece. I was recounting a fun conversation with Fred, the Bahamian host of my AirBNB. It was one of those warm conversations that I could have only with a fellow Bahamian: dialect, slang, known acronyms for places like my high school. I described Fred as White. My sister opined, “I don’t think of ‘Conchy Joes’ [local slang for White Bahamians] as White.”
Then, a few days later I was chatting with a family friend about her daughter who is rapidly advancing up the ranks of Royal Bahamas Police Force (yep, that’s the official name). It’s an impressive accomplishment and my friend is justifiably proud. I said, “You’ve told me your dream is that she will be the first Black woman commissioner of the Police Force.” I quickly corrected, “First woman commissioner of police.” The reason for the correction: in a majority Black country like The Bahamas, mentioning that the person is Black is superfluous. Of course they’re Black. In the Bahamas, Black people are not racial “minorities.”
Context matters. It is not surprising that Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge identify context as one of the six core themes of intersectionality. Perceptions such as my sister’s about Fred’s skin color depend on context. Ditto, socially constructed minoritized statuses such as being Black in a predominantly Black country. I’m a racial minority in the U.S., but not in The Bahamas. I become minoritized when I cross the metaphorical border of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement at the Lynden Pindling International Airport in Nassau.
Intersectionality’s attention to context evinces that this “identity” business is nowhere near as fixed or solid as we think. Thus, it’s best to be judicious about how we deploy the term identity, particularly in the context of intersectionality-work.
Hail y’all later (some Bahamian slang for ya),
Lisa Bowleg, PhD, MA
Founder & President
Intersectionality Training Institute
Ten Things to Ponder Before You Use the Word “Identities” in Your Intersectionality Work
Continuing the musings about intersectional identities, here are 10 points that highlight the nuance and complexity of identity for intersectionality-related work:
- We don’t always know whether the identities we ascribe to others sync with how they identify. Nancy López’s excellent research on “street race” shows that the identities of the perceived and perceiver are not always congruent.
- Without asking, we also don’t know how important or salient an ascribed identity is.
- Many identities are socially constructed, and as such are shaped by geographic and historic context.
- Some identities such as sexual and gender identity are fluid and can shift across the life course; others such as disability, are acquired at birth, age, accident, or fate.
- Focusing on identities risks reifying the exclusively individualistic and individual-level bias of many social and behavioral science disciplines (looking at you psychology).
- Intersectionality is concerned about how power and privilege (both their presence and absence) shape the experiences of groups at particular intersections, regardless of how those groups may or may not identify.
- Focusing solely on identities, particularly in the context of health equity work, implicitly positions the identities rather than interlocking systems of discrimination/stigma based on those “identities” as the source or determinant of health inequities.
- If you are interested in identities (i.e., how people identify, when, and the valence of those identities), then by all means, ask about intersectional identities. But if you are not explicitly interested in how people identify, then consider other words (e.g., intersectional positions, intersections, demographics).
- Reducing intersectional differences to identities detracts from modifiable and intervenable solutions, and as Greta Bauer (2014) has noted, “runs the risk of continuing to reinforce the “intractability of inequity, albeit in a more detailed or nuanced way” (p. 12).
- Attention to “intersectional identities” in most contemporary scholarship does not align with how the Combahee River Collective’s discussed identity politics (more on this below) in their famed statement.
Identity Politics and the Combahee River Collective
And since we’re (still!) on the subject of identity, let’s revisit the business of identity in the context of the Combahee River Collective’s (CRC) Statement. Right wing politicians in the U.S. have been deft at weaponizing key concepts from progressive movements. Thus, it was not at all surprising to hear DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) deployed as a racist epithet against Mayor Brandon Scott, in the wake of the Baltimore Bridge collapse.
The same thing has long happened with the right-wing’s derision of “identity politics,” a term that appears to be used to denigrate and dismiss only the political commitments of historically oppressed groups as exclusionary, rarely the coalitions of powerful White people who have historically codified their exclusionary practices into policies and laws, rendering them normative.
But back to the CRC’s take on “identity politics.” Here’s how they described it in Section 2: What We Believe (second paragraph):
This focusing upon our own oppression [as Black women] is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as oppressed to working to end somebody’s else’s oppression. (CRC, 1977 as cited in Taylor, 2017, p. 19).
Note that this is at least the third mention of the Combahee River Collective’s Statement in Intersectionalia as essential reading. It won’t be the last.
Keenaga-Yamahtta Taylor in her excellent, must-read book, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, includes an insightful interview with Barbara Smith, one of the CRC founders. Asked to clarify what the CRC meant by identity politics, Smith notes that the CRC was simply asserting “the right of people who embody all of these identities [i.e., women, Black, lesbian, working, class and workers] to build and define political theory and practice based on that reality” (p. 61). The CRC never intended identity politics to castigate anyone who didn’t experience oppression based on racialized status, gender, sexual minority status or class; nor was it interested in establishing a hierarchy of oppression.
Thus, it is important to identify the nuance between identities in the context of the identity that the CRC articulated in their statement and the more uncritical use of terms such as “stigmatized identities,” “multiple marginalized identities,” and “intersectional identities” in much of the contemporary work on intersectionality.
References
- Bauer, G. R. (2014). Incorporating intersectionality theory into population health research methodology: Challenges and the potential to advance health equity. Social Science and Medicine, 110, 10-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.03.022
- Combahee River Collective. (1977). The Combahee River Collective statement. In B. Smith (Ed.), Home girls: A Black feminist anthology (pp. 272-282). Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
- López, N., Vargas, E., Juarez, M., Cacari-Stone, L., & Bettez, S. (2017). What’s your “street race”? Leveraging multidimensional measures of Race and intersectionality for examining physical and mental health status among Latinxs. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 4(1), 49-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649217708798
- López, N., & Hogan, H. (2021). What’s your street race? The urgency of Critical Race Theory and intersectionality as lenses for revising the U.S. Office of Management and Budget Guidelines, Census and administrative data in Latinx communities and beyond. Genealogy, 5(3), 75. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy5030075
- Taylor, K.-Y. (Ed.). (2017). How we get free: Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket.
“Without Utilizing an Intersectionality Framework, We Have Completely Overlooked The Specific Needs of Sexual and Gender Minorities of Color”
An Interview with Stephanie H. Cook, DrPh, MPH, New York University School of Global Public Health

Dr. Stephanie H. Cook (she/her) is the New York University James Weldon Johnson Professor, an Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at NYU’s School of Global Public Health, Director of the Attachment and Health Disparities Research Lab, a research team of roughly 20 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral fellow researchers. Primarily focused on young racial/ethnic minority and sexual minority adults who transitioning to adulthood, her intersectionality-informed research examines how structural and individual-level minority stressors shape mental and physical health, and health behaviors across the lifespan. She’s a member of the inaugural 2022 Intersectionality Summer Intensive cohort.
You’re the PI of two new intersectionality-focused R01 grants, plus a joint-PI on another intersectionality R01 with Drs. Lindsay Taliaferro (a fellow ISI 2022 cohort member) and Jennifer Muehlenkamp. A hearty congratulations! What’s it like to receive notice that you’re a PI of not one, but two R01s simultaneously?
SC: I was very overwhelmed when both NOAs (notice of awards) arrived in my inbox within one day of each other. I was also humbled by the experience because I had worked very hard on both submissions for a very long time.
The first R01 examines the link between intersectional discrimination and cardiovascular disease risk among sexual and gender minorities. What’s the genesis of this grant?
SC: As a minority stress and health disparities researcher I have always been interested in understanding pathways and mechanisms linking stressors to health. I have found that without utilizing an intersectionality framework, we have completely overlooked the specific needs of sexual and gender minority (SGM) people of color. In addition, measurement, and metrics for understanding minority stress and health disparities have hindered rather than highlighted the complex nature of individual lived experiences for SGM of color. Thus, I have built much of my career on merging my statistical and public health expertise to create research studies that can highlight as well as chip away at the complex association between minority stress and negative health for SGM of color. This grant stems from my previous work in this area. More specifically, my focus on cardiometabolic health behaviors (CHBs) stems from the stark disparities in CHB’s within SGM populations and the need to understand how the experiences of minority stressors, including intersectional discrimination, influence CHBs.
Also focused on SGM people, your second R01, with your joint-PI Rumi Chunara, will examine the effects of social media discrimination, cardiometabolic health behaviors. What’s the backstory on this grant?
SC: In a previous study our team found that self-reported exposure to online racial discrimination was associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk among Black SGM. But new methods including machine learning, pioneered by our group, are now available to capture daily exposure to discrimination from unstructured social media language, enabling us to go beyond self-reports of perceived discrimination alone. In addition to traditional census-based neighborhood SES stressors, we also use geo-located social media posts to create place-based measures of local racial and homophobic climate at the neighborhood level. In our previous study we found that time spent in places with high racial discrimination and direct exposure to discrimination in one’s Twitter feed are associated with poorer mental health among Black and Latino sexual minority men. Thus in the current R01 we propose to build upon our prior studies by conducting a comprehensive analysis of both stressful and protective online and neighborhood environments and include intersectional discrimination related to gender, sexual orientation, and race/ethnicity.
Intersectionality is central to both grants. Why was it important to you and your research team to investigate these topics using an intersectional lens?
SC: See first part of answer to Question 2. 😀
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for people in the U.S. but a look at the science would make you think that LGBT people were somehow immune. Tell us about your decision to focus on cardiometabolic and CVD risk in SGM populations?
Although my career started in HIV research, I have tried to focus on health beyond HIV because much of the work in HIV, although critically important, limits our understanding of other health conditions which disproportionately impact SGM of color. I wanted to do research that took a whole-person approach and also focus on expanding our understanding of health and well-being among SGM of color. Also, I felt that that the focus on HIV alone was sometimes stigmatizing even when that was not the intent. Thus, I try to conduct research that focuses not only on disparities in health but also how social protections may be key to addressing these disparities.
Methodological innovation is another hallmark of your work. We got the “geographically-explicit ecological momentary assessment (GEMA)” and qualitative mapping going on in the first R01. What is GEMA?
SC: GEMA is a method where we use cell phone location data to create map layers to visualize participant travel patterns during the study period. We will also map: (1) locations where the participant reported experiencing discrimination, organized by identity target (e.g., race, gender, the intersection of race and gender), (2) physical activity, alcohol use, and tobacco use, and (3) social protections. Maps shown to participants during the mapping interviews will be visualized via Google Earth software and shown to participants on a computer. We will then conduct face-to-face, in-depth interviews with study participants using a semi-structured interview guide that also uses the unique interactive map generated for each participant to examine their experiences of discrimination, physical activity, substance use behaviors in specific places displayed on the map.
We plan to ask participants to walk us through their day from the time they woke up until the time they went to sleep, and then we’ll ask them to discuss a moment-by-moment account of activities, experiences, and movements associated with discrimination and CHB. S We’ll also ask them to reflect on the extent to which spatially specific clusters of discrimination and CHB represent their day-to-day experiences. Then we’ll ask them to discuss places they traveled where they did not experience discrimination. The purpose of these prompts is to explore the locations, timing, and situational factors participants associate with their experiences of discrimination and/or harmful CHB.
And why did your you and team deem GEMA and qualitative mapping to be so vital to this study?
SC: I read this paper and thought that this method was a good fit for trying to gather rich or “thick” description about intersectional discrimination and CHB for different groups of SGM of color.
Social media as a source of intersectional discrimination and health risk is intriguing and groundbreaking. To what extent should other health equity researchers consider measuring the health effects of social media in their research
SC: Call me “older”, but I still remember when there were no cell phones. Now young people live a large chunk of their lives online, including young SGM. Therefore, the scientific community must address the influence of social media and the social world on in-person behaviors more broadly.
Specifically in my work, young SGM of color are actively using social media to form supportive communities while also being victimized and discriminated against. Further, the ways in which occurrences of discrimination and positive community engagement online arise are not consistent across SGM groups. Thus, we must utilize an intersectional framework to really understand, intervene, and prevent poor resultant health among SGM of color.
I think one of the barriers to this work previously has been method and measurement. For instance, how do you really measure the impact of social media on in-person behaviors? There are many proposals, but not many new methodologically sound measurement techniques that get us closer to causal inference. I hope the work proposed within this grant chips away at these limitations.

In a world that’s ever grim and challenging what things are bringing you joy these days?
SC: I continue to be an avid reader of science fiction and historical fiction. I also love to simply spend time with my 3- and 6-year-old because kids are really silly and funny!
What was the last book, piece of music, or art you enjoyed that made you think, “This is so good, I gotta tell everybody about this!”? And you’d better hurry and answer, because with three R01s under your belt, plus all of your other personal and professional responsibilities, it will likely be a long time before you enjoy any.
😝 LOL! I already am feeling the crunch! I have Beyonce’s new album on repeat right now, right next to the Frozen soundtrack when the kids are around.
As a member of the inaugural ISI 2022 cohort (pictured above), what would you say is the one thing that you learned during your time at the Intensive that informed one or both grant proposals?
SC: This is a hard one because I learned so much! Hmmmm…..I think the one nugget was to keep trying? I know that sounds cheesy, but I was ready to give up on both of these grants at that point, but attending the Intensive gave me the motivation to keep moving forward. It reinforced the importance of the work and the commitment from so many scholars from across the world.
C3 Intersectionality Publications
Giritli Nygren, K., Olofsson, A., Bowleg, L., Curran, D., Hannah Moffat, K., Mitchell, C., Peek, L., Rubio C, I., & Zinn, J. O. Thoughts about intersectionality and risk. Interviews with key scholar. Journal of Risk Research, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2024.2340027

Would you like to be featured in The C3? We’d love to hear from you. Please email us at info@
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Audre Lorde at the bank! Imagine my surprise when I walked into my local bank in Philadelphia and saw this image and quote of Audre Lorde on the bank’s main TV monitor. The quote reads “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” We’ll never know how Lorde would have thought about her image and work being disseminated in such a context, but I found it to be a wonderful, unexpected and meaningful break in otherwise mundane day. My delighted gasp prompted the teller to ask, “See someone you know?” “In a manner of speaking, and admire very much,” I replied.
Intersectionality in the News
- Lawsuit that a venture capital firm for Black women is discriminatory: Take a deep breath here. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Florida will soon decide whether it can block Fearless Funds, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm that provides $20,000 grants to Black women entrepreneurs, from doing so while they fight a lawsuit charging that their practice of supporting Black women-owned businesses is discriminatory. The conservative activist bringing the case is the same one who successfully overturned the use of “race”-conscious college admissions. The Washington Post featured the story on April 29th
- Intersectional inequities in media coverage in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA): In the wake of March madness and the WNBA draft, it’s been both refreshing (and troubling) to read about the vast differences in media representation that Black WNBA athletes (roughly 80% of the WNBA) get, particularly those who are lesbian, compared with their White heterosexual counterparts. The New York Times has run several interesting articles on the intersectional issue.
Funding Opportunity
- Remember that intersectionality NOSI that we highlighted in March issue of Intersectionalia? Well, NIH’s National Institute of Nursing Research is now inviting grant applications.
The Axes Initiative invites applications to examine the pathways and mechanisms through which SDOH, and related biological, psychological, and behavioral factors impact health and health disparities at intersections of privileged and oppressed social statuses such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and ability. SDOH is a key pathway of interest, therefore examination of federal, state, local, or organizational level policies, programs, or practices, and/or conditions of daily life (e.g., concentrated disadvantage, quality employment and education, housing, and food) on health outcomes at intersections of social statuses is required. Webinar: NINR will hold a Pre-Application Webinar for prospective applicants for the Axes Initiative on Tuesday, May 21, 2024, from 1:00–2:00pm ET. Please register to attend the webinar here.
Hot off the Presses
Health Equity Learning Intensive in Cuba and Writing Retreat in Costa Rica
Dr. Jasmine Abrams, the CEO of Thrive Institutes for Professional Development, and the guest saloniste at our March 2024 Intersectionality Research Salon, has announced two new exciting programs:
- Writing Well Retreat for Researchers
- Dominical, Costa Rica | July 11 – 17, 2024
- Designed to support researchers with balancing productivity and wellness, this retreat offers ample protected writing time, professional development workshops, and space for reflection, restoration, and rejuvenation. Register and learn more HERE
- Global Health Equity Learning Intensive
- Cuba | October 16 – 23, 2024
- Join us as we travel to Havana, Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, and Santa Clara for an immersive global health equity intensive to learn about innovative community based and systems level approaches to health promotion. Register and learn more HERE.
Got something that you’d like to see featured in This, That & The Other? We’d like to know about it. Please email us at info@


April 10th, 2024 Salon Takeaways
Salon Guest: Jameta Barlow, PhD
Salon Title:
Listen to Blackgirls and Women! A Black Feminist and Womanist-Informed Research and Praxis Agenda for Blackgirls’ and Women’s Health
- On the heels of her new book, Writing Blackgirls’ and Women’s Health Science: Implications for Research and Praxis (Lexington Books, 2024), Dr. Jameta Barlow announced her post-sabbatical plans to begin working on her next book, a project she’s been cooking up since 2016. The new book will highlight the policies that create the trauma that in turn harms the health and wellbeing of Blackgirls and Black women, such as lack of access to healthy food. In line with the work of other Black women scholars such as Professor Carol Anderson’s work on the effects of U.S. policy on Black people’s lives, Barlow said that her next book project will show stress that Blackgirls and women aren’t inherently unhealthy; systems created by policies work to make Blackgirls and women unhealthy.
- Barlow, J. N., & Dill, L. J. (2018). Speaking for ourselves: Reclaiming, redesigning, and reimagining research on Black women’s health. Meridians, 16(2), 219-229. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.16.2.03
- Notably, ‘Blackgirls’ is a single word in Barlow’s book title. This is no typo. Barlow explained the seamless blend as an homage to the Blackgirl spirit that resides within all Black women. Separately, ‘Black girl’ is little more than an aggregate identity. Together, ‘Blackgirl’ creates a new meaning that celebrates joy and wonder and evokes the liveliness, curiosity, and spirit that Blackgirls embody. Although she conceded that older generations might not like the Blackgirl concept, it nonetheless evoked various social cultural customs such as getting your hair braided in the summer or wearing beads in our hair as examples.
- Barlow spoke powerfully about her Blackgirls’ and Women’s Philosophy of Science. She traced her philosophy to a “formula” that Black women writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Anna Julia Cooper and Zora Neale Hurston (to name just three of many) had bequeathed Black women over the decades. A Blackgirls’ and Women’s Philosophy of Science is firmly rooted in the histories and lived experiences of Blackgirls and women and a Black feminist ontology.
- “Homecoming,” the last step in Barlow’s Blackgirls’ and Women’s Philosophy of Science aligns with community-based participatory research. Barlow encouraged researchers to think about how they “engage with community, return to community and share what you took from them or what you co-created with them or co-curated with them.” Such respectful community approaches, she noted, also reflected ancient African and Indigenous practices. This community-engaged approach departs starkly from more conventional and extractive research practices.
- Lett, E., Adekunle, D., McMurray, P., Asabor, E. N., Irie, W., Simon, M. A., Hardeman, R., & McLemore, M. R. (2022). Health equity tourism: Ravaging the justice landscape. Journal of Medical Systems, 46(17). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-022-01803-5
- Indeed, philosophy of science features prominently in Barlow’s work and the new book. Barlow called the greater engagement with the philosophy of science “beautiful” because it prompts us to discuss how we come to know what we know (i.e., epistemology) and what exists or is real (i.e., ontology). Barlow described her ontology as a Black feminist/womanist ontology that consists of “engaging the ancestors, environment, and spirituality.” It is shaped by her experiences as a Black woman in the U.S. and her exposures to sexism and racism.
- “Blackgirls be knowing,” an audacious line that earned its own sentence in Barlow’s introductory chapter, describes, Barlow, this very deep Black feminist intuitive knowledge and sacred space that many Blackgirls and women embody. Adapted to academic work, Barlow said that Black women scholars don’t have to expend much time convincing anybody of something they already know, and can rely on a ton of scholarship in Black and Africana Studies and psychology to give them “the receipts to show for it.”
- Barlow writes in the introductory chapter that Black women in spaces is often an unintentional intervention. Asked what she meant by this, she explained, “I wish I had a dollar for every student I meet who tells me I’m still their first Black teach, first Black professor.” She said that often Black women just showing up was an intervention.
- Prompted by a Saloniste to discuss the impact of police violence on Black women, Barlow acknowledged that Black men, not Black women, are the typical subjects of the issue, despite evidence that Blackgirls and women are disproportionately the targets of police violence.
- Crenshaw, K. (2024). # SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. Haymarket Books.
- Crenshaw, K. W. (2019, October 28). “You promised you wouldn’t kill me”. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/opinion/police-black-women-racism.html
- Crenshaw, K. W., & Ritchie, A. J. (2015). Say her name: Resisting police brutality against Black women. African American Policy Forum, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/555cced8e4b03d4fad3b7ea3/1432145624102/merged_document_2+(1).pdf
- McLaurin, M. A. (2021). Celia, a slave (Vol. 5). University of Georgia Press.
- Asked about resilience, Barlow emphasized that resilience was not analogous to ‘super woman syndrome’ or ‘strong Black woman syndrome,’ and that Black women still experience trauma regardless of their strength. She stressed that it was important to understand that resilience did not equal invincibility and that we should not expect Black women to be resilient in the face of intersectional oppression.
- Suslovic, B., & Lett, E. (2023). Resilience is an adverse event: A critical discussion of resilience theory in health services research and public health. Community Health Equity Research & Policy, 2752535X231159721. https://doi.org/10.1177/2752535X231159721
- Self-care, particularly the challenge of self-care for Black women in the academy is a recurrent salon theme. Asked about her self-care practices, Barlow discussed her work as a doula and her love for yoga and mindfulness. She noted her journey to yoga and mindfulness were trauma-led and that her yoga practice had “literally saved her life.” Barlow shared several prescriptions for healing and joy that she has used in her healing work with Blackgirls and women. She encouraged Salonistes to compile a list of things that bring us joy, and then to schedule those things into our calendars to make sure they happen. She noted that it was especially important to incorporate lessons from our ancestors and family, such as the importance of dance, and cited as a favorite this article that she co-edited on the beauty of community dance as a source of stress-release:
- Maddox-Wingfield, C. (2018). The dance chose me: Womanist reflections on Bèlè performance in contemporary Martinique. Meridians, 16(2), 295-307. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.16.2.10
- Barlow also discussed the healing power of writing, what she calls “writehealing.” As she does with participants in her writehealing groups, she invited Salonistes to spend a few minutes writing the answer to one of her favorite questions: “When did you fall in love with yourself?” She also described another favorite activity of inviting people to write affirmations that they can put on a mirror or some other highly visible place. The activity involved saying the affirmation to oneself for 7 days and then reflecting on it each night and observing what shifts. She noted, that something almost always shifts
- Barlow, J. N., Kakooza, M., & Easley, M. (2023). Writehealing: A sistah’s circle praxis to heal and liberate. Women & Therapy, 46(3), 261-283. https://doi.org/10.1080/02703149.2023.2275919

Upcoming Salon
Next Salon Guest: Dr. João Luiz Bastos
Salon Title: “The Mouth As A Site of Compound Injustices”: Key Insights from Structural Intersectionality Research About Endentulism (Yeah, We Had to Look it Up Too) and Other Health Inequities
May 8, 2024, 5 to 6:30 pm ET

#ITI
We (finally) set up an ITI Instagram Page! Give us an @, <3 , a follow… and a whole heap of encouragement because we are social media newbs! Can’t wait to connect with you all there.

Upcoming Training
Get That Dissertation Done! Navigating the Intersectional Dissertation: May 17, 2024 from 10-4pmET. Enroll Here.