Exploring the methodological horizons of intersectionality

The burgeoning literature on intersectionality is a testament to its rapid uptake and wide appeal. Emerging from feminist strands of critical legal theory and sociology, intersectionality is increasingly recognized as a valuable theoretical framework for understanding how health and social inequities are shaped by complex intersecting social locations, categories of difference and systems of oppression. Researchers who engage in intersectionality‐based research are particularly concerned with the ways in which people's lived realities and experiences of oppression result from dynamic interactions between dominant forces such as age‐based discrimination, classism, hetero‐normativity, racialization and colonialism among other forms of social differentiation and exclusion. From the framework of intersectionality, experiences of oppression are temporal, spatial and contingent on cultural and historical contexts.   In this paper, we explore the theoretical and philosophical assumptions underlying intersectionality and discuss its methodological implications for researchers. We focus on issues of commensurability between intersectionality and the theoretical underpinnings of particular research methodologies (case study, critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis)  and suggest that using diverse qualitative methodologies and methods through an intersectionality framework will contribute to the ongoing development of tools for qualitative inquiry. In taking up different methodologies and research methods, we provide examples of how approaches to inquiry may be better “fitted” to an intersectionality framework and discuss how remaining tensions can be harnessed to productively contribute to qualitative health research.