Abstract
The Politics of Intersectional Practice: Representation, Coalition, and Solidarity in UK NGOs takes readers on a tour of nonprofit organizations addressing social inequality in the United Kingdom (UK) and examines how they incorporate intersectionality into their policies and practices. As author Ashlee Christoffersen notes, the book represents one of the few empirical studies on intersectionality among NGOs. Even more significantly, the book appears to be the first to shift the analysis beyond women-specific organizations and consider a wider range of organizations focusing on racial justice, disability justice, migrants, and 2SLGBTQ+ communities. As a result, the author develops a comprehensive portrait of how intersectionality is practiced—and not practiced—among NGOs in the United Kingdom.
The book draws on 41 semi-structured interviews with nonprofit organizations and public sector representatives, as well as focus groups, participant observation, and documentation of UK legislation. The methodology is described in detail and is impressive for its depth and thoroughness. The author is also forthright about their positionality as a white, cisgender woman who is non-disabled, queer, bi, and a settler and migrant from the global North (Canada), which is important in laying the groundwork for the analysis and encourages the reader to continue reading knowing that the author has given full room to participants’ voices. Altogether, the book approaches intersectionality not only as a subject of study but also as a methodology. The diversity and quality of the sources are evident in the chapters, where quotations from organizational representatives are peppered throughout. It is refreshing to hear frontline practitioners and community organizers talk about their work, because writings on intersectionality have tended to be authored by academics and specialists. Christoffersen explains that they purposely sought to build knowledge of intersectionality from the ground up and honor the expertise and know-how of NGO workers.
Overall, the study’s findings reveal a sobering, rather disappointing picture of the state of intersectionality among NGOs. The author found that only about 20 percent of the organizations interviewed were practicing intersectionality, and all of them are led by and for women of color. In contrast, white-led NGOs were generally resistant to intersectionality and appeared to view it as a source of competition over funding. Even more troubling, white-led NGOs considered their own approach to intersectionality to be superior to NGOs led by women of color. On the face of it, it appears that for white-led NGOs, the advent of intersectionality in UK legislation has made it into a battleground over organizational status, expertise, funding, and access to the state. Established racialized power hierarchies within and among NGOs have undermined its progress. Christofferson does not hesitate to implicate white supremacy as a reason why white mainstream organizations have unsuccessfully met the challenge of intersectionality and instead have adopted it in ways that either maintain or reinforce their dominant position and racialized and gendered power hierarchies. In effect, the radical potential of intersectionality has been kept at bay because it seeks to disrupt unequal power relations.
In describing the work of NGOs, the author blends data from the various organizations interviewed. As a result, it is hard to distinguish between the perspectives and experiences of powerful NGOs and those of less powerful ones. Given that Black women and women of color were practicing intersectionality to a greater extent than others, it would have been interesting to include a section that expands on how they conceive and practice it. In addition, as intersectionality stresses the interlocking nature of domination and power, the interview data could have been organized to reveal the disparities in practice based on respondents’ backgrounds and the organizations in which they work. Indeed, the voices of Black women and women of color seemed to be slightly drowned out by the quotations from other NGOs. One wonders whether it would have been possible to break down the findings by organizational type and population—for example, Black women, women of color, racial justice, disability rights, migrant justice, 2SLGBTQ+, and women’s organizations.
The heart of the book is a five-part typology that the author develops to categorize and delineate the variations in intersectional policy and practice among NGOs. Except for the fifth category, called “intersectionality-equality strands,” the other four approaches only address intersectionality in name, not in practice. The description of the five organizational approaches is very detailed, helping readers gain a precise understanding of how various NGOs interpret and respond to intersectionality. Indeed, the typology reveals how intersectionality falls apart in the transition from theory to practice, and how NGOs cobble together strategies that may allude to intersectionality but ultimately prioritize one group over others. The analysis is pertinent both to improving organizational practice and to outlining future research directions.
The book’s strengths lie in the breadth of its data, its grounding in community-based experience, and its delineation of the limits and potential of intersectionality among NGOs. Yet the major focus on learning from NGOs may have somewhat detracted from a more thoroughgoing dialogue with the academic literature. The author cites many relevant academic works, yet they are discussed mainly to outline the book’s unique contributions vis-à-vis others. Beyond intersectionality, the author could have delved further into the literature on NGOs and organizational studies. Missing from the literature review is the large and growing body of literature on Black women’s organizations, Black Lives Matter, immigrant organizations, 2SLGBTQ+ organizations, disability justice, and more. There is also an expanding field of research on whiteness in organizations that could have shed further light on the racialized power dynamics among UK NGOs and how to respond to them. Due to these gaps in the academic literature, the book’s wider contributions to the scholarship on nonprofit organizations are less clear than its relevance to organizational practice and public policy. What the book does well is provide a kind of “status report” on intersectionality in the United Kingdom.
Finally, the book’s language was not always easy to read and interpret. There was a good deal of UK jargon that will be unfamiliar to international readers (e.g., “equality strands”). Moreover, the author employs terminology that seems unnecessarily wordy yet vague, such as “intersectionally disadvantaged” and “intersectionally marginalized.” In these passages, it is unclear to whom the author is referring, and it could be any number of groups, including Black women, migrant women, Muslim women, and/or working-class women. The following is an illustration of unduly complicated and technical-sounding text: on page 107, the book states: “The ‘intersections of equality strands’ concept of, and approach to, intersectionality captures the mutually constitutive nature of inequalities. It lends itself to consideration of multiple levels of intersectionality. Relationality and the simultaneity of privilege and oppression are often accounted for. This is important, since this is the only concept of the five identified which conceptualizes intersectionally marginalized people as agential.” Language like this takes away from the substance and forces the reader to pause and wade through the text. Toward the end of the book, the author proposes that one reason why intersectionality has not been operationalized in the UK is the lack of clarity about the concept among NGO workers. If the book intends to advance intersectionality in organizational practice, it would be important not to contribute to the confusion but to bring greater clarity and precision.