Intersectionality in Housing Research: Early Reflections from a Community-based Participatory Research Partnership

We discuss early reflections of a housing security research project focused on implementing intersectional praxis across the life cycle of community-based participatory research. Drawing on our team’s initial Co-learning Workshop, including community and academic partners, we share initial learnings of our collective engagement with the connections between intersectionality and housing security. Specifically, we reflect on three key challenges, or “hopeful hesitations,” that have emerged as we begin our collaboration: co-defining intersectionality (including both theory and implementation); integrating intersectionality into the multi-scaled complexities of housing security; and communicating the relevance of intersectionality to a wider network of actors in housing security policy and programming. We suggest that an intersectional lens is crucial to housing security work because of the ways it attends to the everyday lived experiences of housing insecurity, the interlocking forms of oppression that create differentiated experiences, and the specific contexts in which structural housing inequities take root.