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What can health inequalities researchers learn from an intersectionality perspective? Understanding social dynamics with an inter-categorical approach?

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Abstract

The concept of intersectionality was developed by social scientists seeking to analyse the multiple interacting influences of social location, identity and historical oppression. Despite broad take-up elsewhere, its application in public health remains underdeveloped. We consider how health inequalities research in the United Kingdom has predominantly taken class and later socioeconomic position as its key axis in a manner that tends to overlook other crucial dimensions. We especially focus on international research on ethnicity, gender and caste to argue that an intersectional perspective is relevant for health inequalities research because it compels researchers to move beyond (but not ignore) class and socioeconomic position in analysing the structural determinants of health. Drawing on these theoretical developments, we argue for an inter-categorical conceptualisation of social location that recognises differentiation without reifying social groupings – thus encouraging researchers to focus on social dynamics rather than social categories, recognising that experiences of advantage and disadvantage reflect the exercise of power across social institutions. Such an understanding may help address the historic tendency of health inequalities research to privilege methodological issues and consider different axes of inequality in isolation from one another, encouraging researchers to move beyond micro-level behaviours to consider the structural drivers of inequalities.

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Notes

  1. Dalit is a term in Marathi, a language spoken in Western India, to denote the ‘untouchables’ or the most oppressed in the caste system. The term was popularised by the Dalit leader and the author of the Indian constitution, Dr B R Ambedkar, and is used both in Indian politics as well as by those seeking to bring issues of caste oppression to the international context.

  2. Sati refers to a traditional ritual practiced in some South Asian communities in which a widowed woman lights herself on the husband’s funeral pyre, as a mark of devotion and chastity to her husband.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Global Public Health Unit, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 22 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, UK

    Anuj Kapilashrami & Sarah Hill

  2. School of Social Work and Social Policy, Strathclyde University, Lord Hope Building, 141 St James Road, G1 0LT, UK

    Nasar Meer

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  1. Anuj Kapilashrami
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Correspondence to Anuj Kapilashrami.

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Kapilashrami, A., Hill, S. & Meer, N. What can health inequalities researchers learn from an intersectionality perspective? Understanding social dynamics with an inter-categorical approach?. Soc Theory Health 13, 288–307 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2015.16

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