2022-23 Department of Psychology Colloquium Series -- Dr.Patrick Grzanka (Univ of TN, Knoxville)

Much of the discourse on intersectionality in psychology focuses on how best to observe or even “test" intersectionality empirically. The fetishization of methods as the key to “finding” intersectionality often reflects what I have called elsewhere psychology's “epistemic riptide” (Grzanka & Miles, 2016), which prefigures intersectionality to be the complex covariance of multiple social identities. In this sense, psychology’s pursuit of intersectional methods can betray what Bowleg (2008) called a latent investment in positivism and what sociologists Luft and Ward (2009) described as an intersectionality "just out of reach." Rather than focus first on the question of method, I suggest that some of the earliest writing on intersectionality in (Smith & Stewart, 1983) and beyond psychology (Crenshaw, 1991) offers invaluable theoretical contributions that should undergird attempts to witness intersectional dynamics among structurally vulnerable groups. I’ll discuss a range of quantitative projects that have used “person-centered” statistics to imagine intersectionality beyond multiple intersecting identities. Most importantly, I argue that fidelity to intersectionality’s roots in Black feminist thought is dependent upon both methodological ambidexterity and even promiscuity—a willingness to follow the trouble, even if it sometimes goes against what counts as “good” psychology (Grzanka & Cole, 2021; Lewis, 2021).