Diversity learning · Foundation

Intersectionality: Understanding Overlapping Experiences

Examine how interacting identities and systems can create experiences that a single-category explanation misses.

About 48 minutes, plus optional practice · 4 lessons · Voluntary learning

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All diversity courses: Foundation, Intermediate, and Advanced

Course outline

Why one category can miss the experience
Explain the problem that intersectional analysis helps reveal.
12 minutes
Look at conditions, not a hierarchy of identities
Identify how context changes an identity-related experience.
12 minutes
Connect supports that otherwise work separately
Identify a gap between separately available supports.
12 minutes
Use intersectionality as a question, not a label
Draft an intersectional question about a specific activity.
12 minutes

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What you’ll be able to do

Explore and practice

Explain the problem that intersectional analysis helps reveal.
Identify how context changes an identity-related experience.
Identify a gap between separately available supports.
Draft an intersectional question about a specific activity.

What you can take into your work

Explain the distinctions in each knowledge check.
Compare the fictional case responses and their consequences.
Prepare and revisit the course job aid using a situation you choose.

Complete the job aid for the fictional event or another non-sensitive process. Describe the interaction, the coordinated change, a whole-pathway check, and one remaining uncertainty. Write a short explanation of what improved without claiming that every member of a group now has equal access. Include a way to revisit the process when new needs become visible.

Intersectionality: Understanding Overlapping Experiences: practice guide

A reusable guide for a situation you choose

Examine how interacting identities and systems can create experiences that a single-category explanation misses.

Use observable details rather than assigning motives.
Invite perspectives without requiring personal disclosure.
Keep learning separate from individual assessment or personnel decisions.

Start with the experience

Describe the activity or opportunity a person is trying to access.
Name the specific steps, conditions, and decisions involved.
Use a fictional example or information voluntarily provided; do not collect a personal identity inventory.

Examine the interaction

Ask whether one barrier changes the effect of another, such as language access combined with an inaccessible format.
Compare what a single-category explanation would see with what it would miss.
Consider power, resources, and institutional design rather than treating identity itself as the problem.

Test a joined-up response

Identify the person or office responsible for each part of the process and connect the work.
Ask whether the proposed supports can be used together in the actual situation.
Review the whole experience after the change, with voluntary feedback and appropriate privacy safeguards.
Record remaining questions without treating one person’s account as universal for a group.

Try the guide and revisit it

Complete the job aid for the fictional event or another non-sensitive process. Describe the interaction, the coordinated change, a whole-pathway check, and one remaining uncertainty. Write a short explanation of what improved without claiming that every member of a group now has equal access. Include a way to revisit the process when new needs become visible.
What would count as a completed improvement in this case? Which claim would go beyond the evidence from one review?

Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.

Sources and further reading

Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) — Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex
Original scholarship on how single-axis analysis can obscure Black women’s experiences; original cases here extend inquiry without erasing that origin.
UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute — What is belonging?
Distinguishes belonging, recognition, voice, and participation in the institutions shaping people’s lives.
U.S. Department of Justice — Introduction to the Americans with Disabilities Act
Authoritative background on equal opportunity and disability access; formal applicability belongs to the responsible agency office.

All research and sources across the program

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Course outline