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.
What happens when scholars and researchers, many of them members of historically oppressed intersectional groups such as women of color, and other people of color do transformative intersectionality research and scholarship within academic disciplines and domains (e.g., peer-reviewed publishing) that refuse to see their work as legitimate? NiCole Buchanan PhD, Marti Jones, PhD, and Isis Settles, PhD will help us close out 2025 (and what a year it’s been!) with an insightful salon focused on the epistemic exclusion of intersectionality work in the academy. Drawing on her extensive research and experience with the topic, Drs. Settles, Jones, and Buchanan show how this form of scholarly devaluation affects tenure and promotion decisions, publication, mental health, and the future of intersectional knowledge production. For those of us in the academy who are passionate about and committed to advancing intersectionality as a field of study, analytic lens and tool for social justice praxis, this insightful salon affirms that it’s not just about naming the phenomenon of epistemic exclusion, but about devising effective strategies to dismantle the practices that sustain it. Don’t miss this one.
Access the Epistemic Exclusions Resource List in the Intersectionality Collective
Recommended Readings:
- Settles, I. H., Warner, L. R., Buchanan, N. T., & Jones, M. K. (2020). Understanding psychology's resistance to intersectionality theory using a framework of epistemic exclusion and invisibility. Journal of Social Issues, 76(4), 796–813. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12403
- Settles, I. H., Jones, M. K., Buchanan, N. T., & Brassel, S. T. (2021). Epistemic Exclusion of Women Faculty and Faculty of Color: Understanding Scholar(ly) Devaluation as a Predictor of Turnover Intentions. The Journal of Higher Education, 93(1), 31–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2021.1914494
- Settles, I. H., Jones, M. K., Buchanan, N. T., Dotson, K., Grower, P., O'Rourke, M., Rinkus, M., & Latimer, K. (2024). Epistemic exclusion: A theory for understanding racism in faculty research evaluations. American Psychologist,79(4), 539–552. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001313
Watch video snippets from previous Salons:
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?
May 2025 with members of the Cite Black Women Collective: Yasmiyn Irizarry, PhD, Daisy E. Guzman Nunez, PhD, and Whitney Pirtle,PhD: How do you read and honor work, while attending to the time, academic and disciplinary constraints?
View all previous Salons, resources, readings and videos in the Intersectionality Collective.
Happy 2026! Listen. We don’t know how it happened either but it’s yet a(nother) new year. This January 2026 marks the start of the fifth anniversary of our Intersectionality Research Salons. We launched our initial salon in January 2022 with the title, “What’s an intersectionality research salon?” And well, those of you who have been rockin’ with us since the beginning know the answer to that question. We are SO grateful for your support and that you continue to return each month and view our salons as the “safe sacred spaces” (quoted from the video we started sharing last year) we intend them to be. We have another fantastic lineup for you this year. We’ll kick of the year, as is our January tradition, with an AMA (Ask Me Anything) About Intersectionality, hosted by Intersectionality Training Institute Founder and CEO, Dr. Lisa Bowleg. It’s more accurate to call the salon an AMaU (Ask Me and Us) Anything About Intersectionality. Why? Our salons are collective affairs, designed to spark conversation not just between the host and guest, but among all gathered. So come prepared to ask questions and get answers about intersectionality. Got questions about intersectionality research? Bring ‘em. Questions about surviving and thriving as an intersectionality scholar in this era’s universities? We got you. Questions about the cool things that ITI is cookin’ up for 2026? We’re here for it! Bring a drink so that we can toast that someway, somehow, we managed to survive a really insane 2025. With or without our mental health intact, we’re still here. Let’s raise a glass to that! See you there!
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. Dr. Clare Evans, our guest for this month’s salon, 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. 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. Joining Lisa as co-hosts of this special salon are Ariel Beccia, PhD and Dougie Zubizaretta, MS who also hail from the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health, are ISI 2022 cohort members, and are intersectionality researchers who’ve published several peer-reviewed articles on MAIHDA. We’re quite excited about the virtual trainings on MAIHDA that Ariel and Dougie will co-facilitate for ITI in fall 2026. Why three co-hosts? Ariel and Dougie are fluent in the language and methods of MAIHDA; Lisa is not and knows her lane. So whether you are mad about MAIHDA, MAIHDA-curious, or MAIHDA-agnostic, you won’t want to miss this salon.
Does intersectionality apply to countries outside the U.S. and North America? If you’ve attended a previous salon, you’ve likely heard this question too. Perhaps you were the person who asked it. It’s an important question that Professor Nivedita Menon, a prominent Indian feminist scholar, writer and professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, has answered in her insightful 2015 article titled, “Is Feminism about “Women”? A Critical View on Intersectionality from India.” This article has long been one of ITI Founder and CEO, Lisa Bowleg’s favorites. Among the many provocative issues that Professor Menon addresses in the article are: (1) the extent to which concepts such as intersectionality developed in the global North should be assumed to have a universal validity, particularly when conceptual analogues have long existed in the global South; and (2) the power of international funding to advance the global travel of concepts such as intersectionality. We are honored to welcome Professor Menon to our salon. Because our typical salon time (5 pm ET) U.S. is roughly 10 and half hours behind New Delhi, we’ll host this salon in the morning [Nat we should insert time here] to accommodate Dr. Menon’s time zone and that of other international salonistes. We hope that you will be able to join us for what will surely be an important conversation about this article and Dr. Menon’s activism and writing.
If in the last three years or so you happened to talk to ITI Founder and CEO, Dr. Lisa Bowleg about what she was working on, you already know what this salon is about: A Framework for Applied Intersectionality Research (FAIR). Informed by her observations of the challenges (and okay, mistakes) that many novice intersectionality researchers were having as they sought to conceptualize what it means to apply intersectionality to their research projects, Bowleg developed FAIR. If you attended ISI 2024 or 2025, you had a preview of FAIR as a work in progress. FAIR, a 6-step process model, highlights key concepts about intersectionality and its relationship to qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research, and the entire empirical research process (i.e., conceptualization, design, analyses, and interpretation), as well as the transformative action (i.e., praxis) for which all intersectional research projects should strive. This salon will welcome back Dr. Shawnika Hull, Associate Professor of Communication in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University (and our September 2024 salon guest), to interview Lisa about the genesis of FAIR, the 6-activities, and why she deems FAIR to be essential reading for researchers interested in applying intersectionality to their work with fidelity to core themes of intersectionality, as well as those who consume and evaluate research projects (e.g., grant proposals, theses and dissertations, articles, book chapters, books) that purport to be intersectional.
Recommended Reading:
Bowleg, L. (In press). A Framework for Applied Intersectionality Research (FAIR): Reframing intersectionality as a tool to advance health equity and social justice action, not just research. Annual Review of Public Health, 47. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-081324-042610