Intersectionality Research Salons™

Fashioned upon A'Lelia Walker's Dark Tower Salons, we envision our Intersectionality Research Salons to be a welcoming and open space, albeit virtual, for salon guests and salonistes (our fancy word for salon attendees) to chat, discuss, ask questions, and share resources about all things intersectionality research-related.

Salons are usually held the second Wednesday of the month at 5PM-6:30PM US ET. They are free. Registration is required.

In the last year, we have featured guests such as Patricia Hill Collins, PhD, Jennifer Gómez, PhD, Zakiya Luna, PhD, MSW, Whitney Pirtle, PhD, Sarah Richardson, PhD, Elle Lett, MD, PhD, members of the Cite Black Women Collective, Isis Settles, PhD, Lanice Avery PhD, and more. Although we have guests hosts from time to time, most Salons are hosted by ITI CEO and Founder, Lisa Bowleg, PhD, MA.

Watch video snippets from past Salons on our YouTube Intersectionality Research Salons Playlist. 

Dorothy Roberts’s new memoir, The Mixed Marriage Project, draws on an archive of nearly five hundred interviews with Black–white couples in Chicago spanning the 1930s to the 1960s. Although interracial marriage was legal, these couples’ lives were tightly governed by structural racism embedded in housing, employment, policing, and family regulation. Gender norms and stereotypes also influenced how couples were treated and the discrimination they experienced. Moreover, crossing the color line did not always mean challenging Chicago’s hierarchies of race and gender—and even could reinforce them. This salon will take an intersectional approach to interrogating interracial intimacy, including the how interlocking systems of racism and sexism influence intimate relationships, how race and gender intertwine to shape both exclusion and desire, and whether increasing interracial intimacy itself signals the triumph of love over racism and sexism.

Watch video snippets from previous Salons:

April 2026 with Jasmine Abrams, PhD: My career journey as an academic entrepreneur 

March 2026 with Nivedita Menon, PhD: A discussion about recently passed laws affecting trans people in India, and the concept of self-determination

September 2025 with Shawnika Hull, PhD: Why intersectionality is so relevant to understanding the issue with Black women and PReP

August 2025 with Zakiya Luna, PhD MSW and Whitney Pirtle, PhD: Why mention Black feminisms when discussing intersectionality? 

June 2025 with Elle Lett, MD, PhD and Fatima Hyacinthe, PhD: How to examine joy when the examination of it might harm it?

View all previous Salons, resources, readings and videos in the Intersectionality Collective.

AI in Health Care:  Intersectionally Speaking, What Could Go Wrong?  

The AI industry, health care systems, and health insurers are adopting AI and fair machine learning systems with lightning speed; often with little (or no) concern about their implications for medical trust and mistrust, patient care or quality, or health equity.  But all one need do is consider the historical and contemporary effects of institutional and structural discrimination against intersectionally diverse Black, Latina/x/o and Indigenous people in health care in the U.S., and well…. what could go wrong?  Our salon guests, Dr. Oni Blackstock and Dr. Elle Lett are going to tell us.  Dr. Lett applies intersectionality as a theoretical and empirical framework to study how clinical prediction models perform across patients’ intersectional positions, and what debiasing approaches best reduce inequities in those models. Dr. Blackstock develops governance frameworks that center the decision-making authority of intersectionally marginalized communities over whether and how health AI gets built and implemented. Together, Dr. Blackstock and Dr. Lett, brilliant physician-researchers, health equity, anti-racist, and intersectionality visionaries, ask urgent questions at the intersection of health AI and equity: how do we account for intersecting positions in the models themselves, and who holds authority over how these models are governed? Curious about what intersectionality adds to the topic of AI and fair machine learning in health care and health equity?  Or what intersectionality researchers should be considering (or absolutely steering clear of) as they assess the implications of AI and fair machine learning for their research? What does it mean for communities most harmed by AI to hold real decision-making power over these systems? And when is AI the wrong solution, and who gets to make that call?  If so, you won’t want to miss this important and illuminating conversation.

Oni Blackstock, MD, MHS, is a globally renowned health care equity expert, researcher, and transformer.  A primary care and HIV physician, Blackstock is the Founder and Executive Director of Health Justice, a consulting firm that supports and empowers health-related organizations to prioritize anti-racism and equity in their work addressing health inequities in their communities. She also leads the Grounded Innovation Lab, Health Justice’s research and design arm, advancing frameworks for community governance of health AI.  The governance frameworks she works on are designed specifically for communities facing intersecting systems of marginalization, centering their role as decision-makers over whether and how health AI enters their lives. Blackstock is the former assistant commissioner for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene where she led New York City’s model approach to ending the HIV epidemic.  Hers is an authoritative voice cautioning the need for community involvement and careful evaluation of the benefits and dangers of AI in health care.

If you’re a longtime saloniste (and many of you are, thank you!), Elle Lett, MD, PhD, MA, MBiostat needs no introduction.  A member of the inaugural ISI 2022 cohort and a two-time salon guest (July 2022 and June 2025), Dr. Lett s a Black, transgender woman, statistician-epidemiologist and physician currently doing her residency in emergency medicine.  A powerful voice in the intersectionality, health equity and medicine space, she has been in the vanguard of physician-researchers advancing knowledge about the implications and risks algorithmic fairness in clinical prediction models and how to mitigate systems of inequity in health services provision.   She is a co-author on the American Health Association’s Scientific Statement on the use of AI for improving heart disease outcomes.

Reading Recommendations

Blackstock, O., & Fatou, A. (2025, August 27). Engage the community in generative AI for public health.  Stat. https://www.statnews.com/2025/08/27/medical-ai-needs-patient-community-engagement/

Blackstock, O. (2025). AI isn't the solution for every problem. Medpage Today. https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/118893

Goodridge, L., & Blackstock, O. (2026, January 25). We must not let AI 'pull the doctor out of the visit' for low-income patients. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/25/ai-healthcare-risks-low-income-people

Blackstock, O. (2026, March 23). The AI push in health care is deepening medicine's trust crisis. Stat. https://www.statnews.com/2026/03/23/ai-use-distrust-american-medicine/

Lett, E., & La Cava, W. G. (2023). Translating intersectionality to fair machine learning in health sciences. Nature Machine Intelligence, 5(5), 476–479. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-023-00651-3

Lett, E., Shahbandegan, S., Barak-Corren, Y., Fine, A., & La Cava, W. G. (2024). Intersectional consequences for marginal fairness in prediction models for emergency admissions. medRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.11.05.24316769

Lett, E., Shahbandegan, S., Barak-Corren, Y., Fine, A. M., & La Cava, W. G. (2025). Intersectional and marginal debiasing in prediction models for emergency admissions. JAMA Network Open, 8(5), https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.12947

ORCHID (Organizational Readiness for Community Health AI Partnerships)

Harmful beauty:  Intersectional environmental injustice with Ami Zota, ScD

What do hair relaxers, skin lighteners, other beauty-related chemicals, and other toxic environmental exposures have to do with intersectionality?  Dr. Ami Zota’s will tell us.  Zota’s pioneering research on everyday chemical exposures and reproductive, gynecological and community health exemplifies the power of intellectual activism.  She’s in the vanguard of researchers using an intersectional approach to empirically document how racism, sexism and classism disproportionately shape harmful chemical exposures and other negative health outcomes for women of color.  Join us for this pivotal salon in which we’ll ask Dr. Zota about her groundbreaking research, her community-based research collaborations to reduce the risks in the beauty products that Black, Latina, Asian women and femme-identifying people use most frequently, and how she remains inspired to do this work in light of what must surely be pushback from the big multinational beauty corporations.

Ami Zota, ScD is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.  She is the principal investigator of FORGE, the first intersectionality study funded by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).  Informed by intersectionality and the intersectional exposome, the goal of FORCE is to identify modifiable drivers of racial inequities in uterine fibroids.  Zota is also the founding director of the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice program, which trains early career scientists from systematically marginalized backgrounds to do science communication, storytelling and community engagement and policy transformation to shift mainstream narratives about environmental and climate justice.  Dr. Zota’s pioneering work has garnered multiple awards and honors.  In 2017, Dr. Zota was recognized as a Pioneer under 40 in Environmental Public Health by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment.  Most recently, the American Public Health Association honored her with its 2025 David P. Rall Award for Advocacy in Public Health.

Recommended Readings
Zota, A. R., Franklin, E. T., Weaver, E. B., Shamasunder, B., Williams, A., Siegel, E. L., & Dodson, R. E. (2023). Examining differences in menstrual and intimate care product use by race/ethnicity and education among menstruating individuals. Frontiers in Reproductive Health, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/frph.2023.1286920

Zota, A. R., & VanNoy, B. N. (2021). Integrating intersectionality into the exposome paradigm: a novel approach to racial inequities in uterine fibroids. American Journal of Public Health, 111(1), 104–109.  https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305979

Zota, A. R., & Shamasunder, B. (2017). The environmental injustice of beauty: Framing chemical exposures from beauty products as a health disparities concern. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 217(4), 418.e411–418.e416. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2017.07.020

Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, PhD, MPH, CHES, FNAP

 Disrupting Gendered Racism to Advance Health Equity for Black Women and Birthing People: The Power of the MOTHER Lab

Stunning but true: Black women in the U.S. have rates of pregnancy-related mortality and morbidity more than three times higher that of their white counterparts. Moreover, higher education and incomes provide no buffer from these inequities.  Although numerous studies have examined the role of biology and Black women’s behaviors as contributors, Dr. Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha’s own lived experience and research document that gendered racism is a formidable obstacle to positive birth outcomes for Black women in the U.S.  Amutah-Onukagha is the legendary founder and director of the Center for Maternal Health Advancement, one of the first centers dedicated nationwide to addressing maternal health inequities.  She is also the founder and director of the MOTHER  (Maternal for Translational Health Equity Research) Lab — hands down one of the best acronyms for a research lab in history! The goal of the MOTHER Lab, the largest maternal health research lab in U.S is to address and eradicate Black women and people’s pregnancy-related inequities through research, advocacy and mentorship.  Amutah-Onukagha’s work exemplifies the transformative power of community-engaged research, activism and practice.  If you’re seeking some inspiration amid abundant darkness, this is the salon for you.

Ndidi Amutah-Onukagha, PhD, MPH, CHES, FNAP is the Julia A. Okoro Professor of Black Maternal Health in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Her current research interests include maternal health inequities, reproductive health and social justice, infant mortality, and HIV/ in Black women. Dr. Amutah-Onukagha also serves as the inaugural Assistant Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Public Health and Professional Degree Programs. In 2022 Dr. Amutah-Onukagha founded the Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice (CBMHRJ) at Tufts University School of Medicine. Her groundbreaking research and advocacy have earned her numerous accolades, including the 2023 Humanitarian of the Year Award from the March of Dimes and recognition as one of the 2020 Top 40 under 40 Minority Leaders in Healthcare.  Her expertise has been featured in major outlets such as The New York Times, The Lancet, MSNBC, USA Today, and a TEDx talk titled "A Broken Healthcare System: Racism and Maternal Health."

Reading Recommendations
Amutah-Onukagha, N. (2022). A broken healthcare system: Racism and maternal health. Retrieved March from https://www.ted.com/talks/dr_ndidiamaka_amutah_onukagha_a_broken_healthcare_system_racism_and_maternal_health

Amutah-Onukagha, N., Yada, F. N., & Olden, H. A. (2025). Advancing birth quality by bridging historical and contemporary gaps in black maternal health. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing: JOGNN, 54(3), 332–333. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jogn.2025.03.003

Yada, F. N., Huber, L. R. B., Brown, C. S., Olorunsaiye, C. Z., Glass, T. S., & Amutah-Onukhaga, N. (2024). Labor and delivery characteristics by detailed maternal nativity across the black diaspora: Place and method of delivery. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-024-02120-y

The Polyglot InDI (Intersectional Discrimination Index): Lessons from Self-Reported Measures of Intersectional Discrimination in English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese with  João Bastos, PhD; Ana María del Rio González, PhD, MS; Ayden Scheim, PhD

Fala Portuguese?  Habla Espanol?  Speak English?  Developing and validating strong self-report measures of intersectional discrimination is essential for quantitative intersectionality research.   If you speak any (or all )of those languages or conduct intersectional discrimination research with people that do, this team of intersectionality researchers has you covered.   Dr. Ayden Scheim, a co-developer with Dr. Greta Bauer of the InDI (intersectional Discrimination Index) and Dr. João Bastos and Dr. Ana María del Río González, who collaborated with Dr. Scheim on the validation of the Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish versions of the InDI respectively, will join us to discuss all things international InDI, including the methodological strategies and challenges of adapting the InDI for different national, cultural and linguistic contexts. Interested in quantitative intersectional measurement? Curious about how people answer questions about discrimination in Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese?  Até lá! Te veo allí! See you there!

João Luiz Bastos, PhD is an Associate Professor of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada.  Trained as a dentist (yeah, we this information surprised us too), Dr. Bastos is an expert on the health effects of racism, including the health impacts from interlocking systems of oppression. In addition to these topics, Dr. Bastos has been involved in the development of the first-ever Brazilian scale on experiences with discrimination, as well as studies on intersectionality, discrimination, and health inequities across different countries such as Australia, Brazil, and the United States.

Ana María del Rio-González, PhD, MS (ISI 2022) is an Associate Professor in the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University.  Grounded in intersectionality, Dr. del Río-González’s program of research focuses on understanding how multiple and interlocking identities (e.g., ethnicity, gender identity, and immigrant status) and the social processes associated with them (e.g., white supremacy, transphobia and xenophobia) drive health inequities among marginalized populations, especially at the intersections of race/ethnicity and sexual and gender minority status. Her work has been recognized with the 2022 “Early-Stage Investigator Award” of the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office at the National Institutes of Health, and the Trans-Latinx DMV Community Honors “Committed Ally Award” in 2021.

Ayden I. Scheim, PhD, is a Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute, at the UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, CA, and co-developed the InDI with Dr. Greta Bauer.  Scheim’s research uses intersectional and participatory approaches to address health and social inequities facing sexual and gender minority populations globally. He has led national community-based research surveys of transgender health and human rights in India and Canada, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He also leads evidence synthesis and measurement research, with a focus on measuring interpersonal and structural stigma.

Recommended Readings
Bastos, J. L., Gebrekristos, L. T., Dale, S. K., del Río-González, A. M., Bauer, G. R., & Scheim, A. I. (2025). The inner workings of the Intersectional Discrimination Index: (Re)assessing the internal validity of the anticipated, day-to-day, and major discrimination measures. Stigma and Health. https://doi.org/10.1037/sah0000611

Pereira, N. P., Bastos, J. L., & Lisboa, C. S. d. M. (2022). Intersectional Discrimination Index: Initial stages of cross-cultural adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese. Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia, 25. https://doi.org/10.1590/1980-549720220028

Scheim, A., & Bauer, G. R. (2019). The Intersectionality Discrimination Index: Development and validation of measures of self-reported enacted and anticipated discrimination for intercategorical analysis. Social Science and Medicine, 226, 225–235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.12.016

Scheim, A. I., Bauer, G. R., Bastos, J. L., & Poteat, T. (2021). Advancing intersectional discrimination measures for health disparities research: Protocol for a bilingual mixed methods measurement study. JMIR Research Protocols, 10(8), e30987. https://doi.org/10.2196/30987

TRANSforming Health: Intersectional and Community-Engaged Pathways to Health Equity for Transgender and LGBQ+ People with Tonia Poteat, PhD, PA-C, MPH

 The structural oppression of transgender people is yet another devasting hallmark of this era of retrenchment.  On the day of this writing  alone (February 20, 2026), The New York Times reported that Kansas, Idaho, Utah and Oklahoma have introduced legislation to restrict the rights of transgender people, and that NYU Langone Health had terminated its gender medicine program for minors citing the “current regulatory environment.”  In the midst of these obstacles, Dr. Poteat’s intersectionality-informed and community-engaged projects designed to identify actionable strategies to reduce and eliminate health inequities for Black and Latina transgender people are vital, not just theoretical.  Join us for this last salon of the year (yeah, we’re stunned that it’s already December too) to learn why intersectional projects such as Poteat’s impressive TRANSforming the Carolinas Project, that prioritize structural context, community-engaged research, and policy change are an essential direction for intersectional work.  We’ll also ask Dr. Poteat what sustains her and her work in the wake of the unrelenting attacks on transgender people in the U.S.

You know how they call celebrities who can sing, dance and act “triple threats”?  Dr. Tonia Poteat, PhD, PA-C, MPH is the academic version of the “quadruple threat”: a clinician, community-engaged researcher, teacher and intellectual activist.  Internationally renowned, Dr. Poteat has a demonstrably strong and long commitment to providing quality care and conducting research to help advance health equity for transgender people. Poteat is a clinician and public health scientist with more than 20 years of experience as a certified physician assistant and more than a decade of experience conducting community-engaged research. She is currently a Professor in the Duke University School of Nursing, a Research Professor of Global Health, the Associate Director of the Duke Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Developmental Core, and Co-Director of the Duke Sexual and Gender Minority Wellness Program. She has also held faculty positions at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, including serving as an Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Core Faculty at the Center for Health Equity Research. Dr. Poteat is certified as an HIV Specialist by the American Academy of HIV Medicine and as a Gender Specialist by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Reading Recommendations
Poteat, T. C., Ehrig, M., Ahmadi, H., Malik, M., Reisner, S. L., Radix, A. E., Malone, J., Cannon, C., Streed, C. G., Toribio, M., Cortina, C., Rich, A., Mayer, K. H., DuBois, L. Z., Juster, R.-P., Wirtz, A. L., & Perreira, K. M. (2025). Hormones, stress, and heart disease in transgender women with HIV in LITE Plus. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 68(2), 245–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2024.10.001

Poteat, T. C., Linton, S. L., Wirtz, A. L., Gutierrez, C., Adams, D., Brown, C., Miller, M., Mitchell, D. N., DeAngelis, R., Kornbluh, W., & Reisner, S. L. (2025). Structural drivers of health among transgender women in the United States: A nationwide study. Health & Place, 95, 103511. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2025.103511

Poteat, T., & Simmons, A. (2022). Intersectional structural stigma, community priorities, and opportunities for transgender health equity: Findings from TRANSforming the Carolinas. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 50(3), 443–455. https://doi.org/10.1017/jme.2022.86