The Complexity of Intersectionality with Dr. Skyler Jackson

This lecture is co-hosted by the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Women, Gender, & Sexuality with support from the Intersectionality Community of Scholars. Please join us for a lecture with Dr. Skyler Jackson (Yale University) on the complexity of intersectionality research in psychology. Registration is required at the Zoom link provided.

"Drawing Outside of the Lines: Embracing the Complexity of Identity and Intersectionality of Stigma in Psychological Research"

Although decades of scholarship demonstrate that experiences of stigma serve as key determinants of health among marginalized populations, this literature disproportionally reflects the experiences of prototypical minority group members and overlooks the unique forms of stigma endured by people with complex or poorly understood identity configurations. For example, although it is understood that people are at risk for enduring multiple, interlocking health-eroding systems of oppression, existing scholarship generally reflects a unidimensional approach to stigma, focusing on one type of stigma (e.g., homophobia) in isolation from others (e.g., racism, sexism). In this presentation, Jackson illuminates the ways this tendency limits how we conceptualize, measure, report, and intervene upon stigma as a determinant of health, allowing many health inequities to remain obscured and entrenched. To illustrate the novel research that can be generated by embracing the complexity of stigma in contemporary mental and sexual health investigations, Jackson will present an interconnected series of scholarly works (e.g., measurement, experience sampling, intervention) to elucidate the ways racism and homophobia intersect to drive health among LGBTQ people of color. He will also discuss other ways, beyond intersectionality, to embrace identity complexity and address health inequities among non-prototypical minorities, such as his current work to develop a cross-population model of stigma, stress, and health for stigmatized groups that blur or challenge binary categories (e.g., multiracial people, bisexual people, gender non-binary people).