Lisa Sibbett

Intersectionality is celebrated in education research for its capacity to illuminate how identities like race, gender, class, and ability interact and shape individual experiences, social practices, institutions, and ideologies. However, although widely invoked among educational researchers, intersectionality is rarely unpacked or theorized. It is treated as a simple, settled concept despite the fact that, outside education research, it has become in the early 21st century one of the most hotly debated concepts in social science research. Education researchers should therefore clarify and, where appropriate, complicate their uses of intersectionality. One important issue requiring clarification concerns the question: “Who is intersectional?” While some critical social scientists represent intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization, others frame it as a theory of multiple identities. Either choice entails theoretical and practical trade-offs. When researchers approach intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization, they contribute to seeking redress for multiply marginalized subjects’ experiences of violence and erasure, yet this approach risks representing multiply marginalized communities as damaged, homogenous, and without agency, while leaving the processes maintaining dominance uninterrogated. When scholars approach intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities, meanwhile, they may supply a fuller account of the processes by which advantage and disadvantage co-constitute one another, but they risk recentering Whiteness, deflecting conversations about racism, and marginalizing women of color in the name of inclusivity. A review of over 60 empirical and conceptual papers in educational research shows that such trade-offs are not often made visible in our field. Education researchers should therefore clarify their orientations to intersectionality: They should name the approach(es) they favor, make arguments for why such approaches are appropriate to a particular project, and respond thoughtfully to potential limitations.

Review of Zimmerman, J., & Robertson, E. (2017). The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 122 pp., $22.50, paperback, ISBN-13: 9780226456348; $68.00, hardback, ISBN-13: 9780226456201; $22.50, ebook, ISBN-13: 9780226456485.

Despite adolescents' abundant intellectual, cultural, and community resources, many are profoundly alienated from school. In exploring this paradox, the author contrasts two views of education: deficit and abundance. She conducted a practitioner research study to harness what Yosso (2005) calls students' " community cultural wealth, " but discovered instead patterns of deficit thinking in her own practice. Using scholarly personal narrative, the author shows how her own teaching and classroom management strategies inhibited meaningful learning, even when she thought she was inviting students' resources into the classroom. She reads their behavior under deficit conditions as evidence of resources clamoring to be liberated and used. In the end, study participants teach the author more than she expected about what an abundance classroom looks like.

This article uses a well-received recent text— Hess and McAvoy's The Political Classroom— to suggest that democratic citizenship education today has a social accountability problem. I locate this discussion in the context of a longstanding conflict between the critical thinking approach to democratic citizenship education, the approach typified by The Political Classroom, and the critical pedagogical approach, which has an equal but opposite problem, that of indoctrination. If democratic citizenship educators are truly interested in transforming the social order, I suggest, then we need to listen appreciatively, and respond thoughtfully, to critiques of the approach we favor. The article ends by outlining a possible way forward, by means of a concept I term " transformative criticality. " I suggest that such an approach to criticality is enacted in another well-received recent volume in the field, Stitzlein's Teaching for Dissent.