ABSTRACT
The academy can be a hostile place for Black women as it was never designed to support, sustain, or retain us. Despite the academy, Black women have navigated, negotiated, and learned how to thrive from our own standpoints in the face of white supremacy and misogynoir, yet, we continue to face intersectional oppression and erasure in and outside of the ivory tower. In this chapter, the authors advance Intersectionality Methodology (IM), a Black feminist methodological praxis that brings the gravity of Black women’s intersectional subordination “into full view, in a way that forces the trivial and mundane to actually bear weight.” Authors extend MacKinnon’s work about intersectionality as method, which articulated the methodological underpinnings of intersectionality, but not as a specific set of data collection techniques researchers use in social science. Grounded in Crenshaw’s three-dimensional intersectionality framework, the authors detail the four features of IM and offer specific examples of how IM praxis can be used to excavate, name, and address intersectional subordination in the academy, particularly to benefit Black women.
