Special Issue Theme
Interwoven Struggles: Intersectionality, Culture, and the Politics of Belonging
Guest Editors
Hasan Aydin, Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL, USA
Nuntiya Doungphummes, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University, Thailand
Aims & Scope
Over the past three decades, intersectionality has become a critical lens for examining how power operates across interconnected categories such as race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and ability. While its conceptual origins are rooted in Black feminist theory (Crenshaw, 1989; 1991), its analytical reach has since expanded across disciplines and geographies. Despite its widespread usage, intersectionality is often invoked superficially and mentioned without being meaningfully applied. This special issue revisits intersectionality as a critical social theory (Collins, 2019; Collins & Bilge, 2020), calling for renewed attention to its radical roots, its potential for contemporary critique, and its relevance for analyzing cultural hierarchies, marginality and resistance in an era marked by global precarity, rising authoritarianism, and forced migration.
We aim to encourage submissions that move beyond additive models of identity and toward complex, interlocking analyses of cultural politics and structural inequality. In particular, we seek contributions that analyze how hegemonic cultural narratives — surrounding race, migration, gender, class, and nationhood — are produced, reinforced, or contested through media, education, institutions, and everyday practices. What forms of inclusion are celebrated, and what forms of difference are erased or delegitimized? How are taste, value, and legitimacy hierarchies sustained, and who resists them?
This special issue builds on the journal’s interest in culture and social change by welcoming conceptually innovative and empirically grounded contributions. Submissions may explore intersectionality in relation to, but not limited to, cultural appropriation and authorship; race and class in creative labor; intersectional experiences of migration, diaspora, and displacement; LGBTQ+ visibility and exclusion in media; youth resistance cultures; neoliberal multiculturalism; and intergenerational identity formation. Contributions addressing the intersection of environmental justice, indigeneity, and race or those drawing on non-Western and decolonial approaches are particularly welcome.
This special issue aims to contribute to contemporary debates about belonging, inequality, and resistance across cultural contexts by centering work that challenges hegemonic narratives and foregrounds the lived complexities of intersecting identities.
We cordially invite you to submit an abstract on the aforementioned themes with a 300-word limit in American English. Please send your abstracts via email to the guest editors at haydin@fgcu.edu and nuntiya.dou@mahidol.ac.th
Timeline
Abstracts Due: August 1, 2025
Decisions on Abstracts: August 15, 2025
Full Manuscript Due: November 15, 2025
Final Submission Due: January 15, 2026
Special Issue Published: April 2026
References
Anthias, F. (2012). Transnational mobilities, migration research and intersectionality. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 2(2), 102–110. https://doi.org/10.2478/v10202-011-0032- 3
Collins, P. H. (2019). Intersectionality as critical social theory. Duke University Press.
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality (2nd ed.). Polity.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
Nash, J. C. (2008). Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.4