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Intersectionality Meets Infrastructure: Recruitment Matrices and Identity Overflow in Just Research
Carla Rice1, Chelsea Temple Jones1,2, Kimberlee Collins1
1University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Qualitative Inquiry : QI
|April 30, 2026
Summary
This study re-examines intersectionality, revealing its potential as infrastructure for understanding complex social relations. It proposes an "infrastructural inversion" to uncover hidden socio-material implications and decolonize categorization beyond white supremacist thought.
Area of Science:
- Social Sciences
- Critical Theory
- Sociology
Background:
- Intersectionality's theoretical and methodological evolution presents challenges for research application.
- The uptake of intersectionality by institutions and critiques of its appropriation necessitate re-evaluation.
- Monolithic identity frameworks are challenged by the heterogeneity of difference, impacting intersectional theorizing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To reconsider intersectionality's explanatory power in understanding selves and socialites.
- To explore intersectionality's potential as infrastructure through an "infrastructural inversion" critique.
- To enable a decolonized understanding of intersectionality beyond hierarchical categorizations.
Main Methods:
- Adopting a processual-relational framing to analyze difference.
- Utilizing an "infrastructural inversion" to reveal hidden work and socio-material implications.
- Employing "wild containers" (research matrices) to illuminate nondominant differences.
Main Results:
- Difference is identified as a site of both possibility and danger, exposing limitations of monolithic identities.
- Intersectionality's potential as infrastructure is revealed through an analysis of its socio-material implications.
- An "infrastructural critique" uncovers classification systems underpinning intersectionality.
Conclusions:
- Intersectionality can function as infrastructure, requiring a critical examination of its hidden operations.
- A decolonized understanding of intersectionality involves inter-/intra-sectional becomings that move beyond imposed hierarchies.
- The study suggests a path toward more inclusive and nuanced research practices by deconstructing existing categorization systems.
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