Advancing Equity and Applying Intersectionality in Europe: Challenges and Contradictions

Advancing Equity and Applying Intersectionality in Europe: Challenges and Contradictions

Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Time: 2:30pm - 4:00pm ET
Location: S638 Ross Building (Hybrid Event)
Zoom Registration: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIpduCqrTIsG9Bt9fYc3Oxpll4L3dTJKgv5#/registration

2025 will mark half a century since the first European directives prohibiting identity-based discrimination. However, social inequities are increasing. Moreover, equity policy remains hugely 'siloed,' predominantly focused around single issues/identities, best serving intersectionally privileged groups (e.g. white women). Yet, intersectionality, the Black feminist theory that inequalities are indivisible from one another, is increasingly difficult for those with influence on equity policy to ignore or explicitly resist. This presentation will give an overview of intersectionality, identify barriers to its operationalization in Europe, examine the UK in more detail as a case study, and reflect on contemporary challenges and contradictions for advancing equity and applying intersectionality.

Ashlee Christoffersen is a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research is about the operationalization of intersectionality in policy and practice. She is the author of The Politics of Intersectional Practice: Representation, Coalition, and Solidarity in UK NGOs (2024, Bristol University Press), and articles about equity policy and intersectionaity in the European Journal of Politics and Gender, Social Politics, Canadian Public Administration & Policy & Politics.