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12: Conclusion: Future Directions in Knowledge Building and Sustaining Institutional Change
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274 /////////////~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This collection of chapters illustrates the viability and analytical power of intersectional analysis for studying inequality in the U.S. context, for building knowledge, and for creating institutional change. Drawing on empirical research and studies of policies and practices that impact the lives of low-income women and women of color, it reveals the interplay of power, identity, and social location as it affects options and opportunities in employment, access to and use of government and employer benefits, political and civic participation, K– schooling, and in the scope and structure of higher education. This concluding chapter summarizes the theoretical conclusions of the articles and discusses the ways they contribute to an understanding of intersectionality. In light of these insights it briefly discusses the numerous critical debates, tensions , and major intellectual challenges about the scope, purpose, place, meaning, and future of intersectional analyses, and describes new frontiers for future inquiry and theoretical development. The intersectional analytic lens that informs all of these articles acknowledges that social relations involving historically underrepresented and poor people are complex and that much of that complexity is hidden by the way relations of power are embedded in social structures, policies, and practices. Examining the roots of the problems these groups encounter requires unveiling these relations of power. Primary among the social relations that effect these populations are issues of race, racialization, and racial formations. A fundamental theoretical conclusion of the articles in this collection is that racialized constructions of groups are used to maintain systems of inequality. Yet, increasingly, these historical patterns of discrimination and inequality are masked by a new focus on diversity and a new rhetoric of a color-blind society (Bonilla-Silva, ; Collins, ). 12 Conclusion Future Directions in Knowledge Building and Sustaining Institutional Change RUTH ENID ZAMBRANA AND BONNIE THORNTON DILL Consistent with other writings using an intersectional frame, the chapters in this book demonstrate that dimensions of inequality are not readily separable but mutually constituted and that social problems, policies, and practices are not singly the result of either race, or class, or gender alone but the product of a particular intermeshing of these and other dimensions of inequality to create varied results for differing groups or individuals in specific locations at distinct historical moments. The second theoretical conclusion challenges a pattern that remains prevalent in too many areas of the social sciences where increased attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status has yielded simplistic explanations in which these factors are treated separately and used as causal explanations failing to accurately represent or explain the lived experiences of poor and racialized women and men in U.S. society. (For a discussion of this issue as it applies to political science, see Simien, .) Intersectional analyses challenge monocausal explanations of inequalities and differences to make visible power relations and structural arrangements that maintain the oppressions and exclusion of low-income people and people of color and seek to promote interdisciplinary knowledge building to produce understanding of and change in the lives of groups of people who have been and remain in subordinate positions. Chapters through of the book illustrate the importance of historical and geographic context in shaping domains of inequality. These chapters reveal the ways race, ethnicity, low socioeconomic status, gender, and culture combine in producing discriminatory policy and practices. There are two important theoretical conclusions that we draw from the application of intersectional analysis in these cases. First, historical context is essential in revealing how domains of inequality are intermeshed, how those particular arrangements have been produced , and how they affect contemporary policy such as access to higher education , low representation of women of color in the professional and corporate world, and the design and implementation of programs targeted toward poverty. In these chapters we see that meaningful insights about the similarities and differences among racial and ethnic groups can only be derived from an understanding of historic inequities and the role they play in producing contemporary inequalities. Their findings also demonstrate that historic, economic, and cultural patterns of subordination result in processes of social and emotional disadvantage that are cumulative over generations. The second conclusion is that intersectionality as a theoretical framework provides tools for examining the relationship of race and power in relationship to other dimensions of inequality and difference. In that process, we gain a deeper understanding of the subtle and often invisible ways that racial formations combine with dimensions of privilege (such as Whiteness) and exclusion (such as poverty) to produce inequities for people in a...