Intersectionality and kyriarchy: A framework for approaching power and social justice in planning and climate change adaptation

Abstract

In order to better understand existing inequality and injustice in our cities and spaces, and to understand how vulnerability to future impacts in the context of climate change is constructed and experienced, many scholars have noted that we need to incorporate multiple factors that shape identity and access to power and resources in our analyses, including race, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Less widely acknowledged is the intersectionality of these factors; that specific combinations of these factors shape their own social position, lived experience, and thus affect access to power and experiences of oppression and vulnerability. To address emerging issues like climate change it is vital to find a way to understand and approach these multiple, intersecting axes of identity that shape how impacts will be distributed and experienced. This paper introduces intersectionality, a concept for understanding multiple, co-constituting axes of difference and identity, and kyriarchy, a theory of power that describes the power structures intersectionality produces, and offers researchers a fresh way of approaching the interactions of power in planning research and practice.

White Allyship of Afro-Diasporic Women in the Workplace: A Transformative Strategy for Organizational Change

“…A. Bell, 1997; Delgado & Stefancic, 1997; Du Bois, 1953; Erskine et al, 2019; Osborne, 2015; Wing, 1997). Although White supremacy appears to be a worldwide ideology, its particular manifestations in the United States influence the advancement of women in corporate America.…”

Gendered perception and vulnerability to climate change in urban slum communities in Accra, Ghana

“…In this context, some critical feminist scholars (e.g. Nightingale 2006;Lykke 2009;Osborne 2015) have suggested the need for intersectional approach as a means for analysing how power differentials work together to produce differentiated vulnerabilities for different categories of men and women. There is a need for more studies into the social aspects of vulnerability from an intersectional perspective that will develop in-depth understanding of the nature of differentiated vulnerability and adaptation resulting from the interplay between gender and multiple dimensions of social, economic and institutional power relations.…”

Racial Equity in Planning Organizations

“…Instead, planners must adhere to the notion it is not "either/or but both and more" (Gready et al, 2010). Social equity efforts do not have to come at the cost of responding to other forms of inequity, precisely because power and oppression exist across multiple and overlapping social identities (Crenshaw, 1991;Holvino, 2010;Osborne, 2015). By focusing on race, planners can better respond to these contextspecific configurations of social marginalization.…”