Conference Program

Intersectionality, as conceptualized by Crenshaw (1989) and further developed within educational research by scholars such as Davis (2015; 2023), provides a powerful framework for examining the compounded effects of social identities including ‘race’, gender, class, and disability. These foundational texts underscore intersectionality's role in exposing how overlapping oppressions shape educational inequities, challenging monolithic analyses that fail to represent lived experiences. Recent scholarship, including Nichols and Stahl's (2020) systematic review of higher education applications and OECD reports on policy implications, highlights its urgency (2023): without it, research risks perpetuating simplistic categories, invalidating findings, and failing to inform equitable practices.

Using as a research object a study carried out in the recent past by one of the authors on teachers’ conceptions of intercultural education, the paper explores how intersectional blind spots can arise in the design and analysis of educational research. The analysis unfolds in two phases: the first re-examines the original study to identify where intersectional dimensions were overlooked. The analysis focuses on how the research framed participants and interpreted their perspectives through singular analytical categories. This framing risks overlooking how intersecting identities shape teachers’ conceptions and may conceal power relations present in diverse educational contexts. The analysis is conducted through two complementary standpoints: the insider perspective of one researcher who participated in the original study, and the analytic distance of a second researcher who was not involved in the data collection. This dual perspective is used to identify methodological blind spots and tensions that emerge when attempting to apply intersectionality in empirical research.

The second phase identifies concrete points in the research design where an intersectional perspective could have been introduced. Methodological components, including participant selection, data elicitation strategies, and thematic coding, are examined to determine where intersectionality was ignored, where it could have been incorporated, and which specific methodological choices could have supported it.

Based on this two-step analysis, the paper develops a set of methodological guidelines for designing and reviewing research that help researchers develop intersectionality-informed studies, avoiding reducing complex identities in simplified social categories by recognizing where and how typical gaps may emerge throughout their research process. These guidelines translate intersectional theory into concrete research practices, addressing participant recruitment, conceptual operationalization, data analysis, and reporting procedures. They are formulated as practical design principles that can guide future studies examining teachers’ conceptions and similar educational phenomena. .

The tools presented shall support a practice coherent with the fundamental understanding that intersectionality should be treated not as an additional analytical layer, but as a fix methodological requirement when studying complex educational realities. In particular, the paper shows how intersectional realities can become methodologically invisible when research relies on conventional categories and examines social positions through singular lenses, rather than approaching social positioning as relational, dynamic, and shaped by power relations.