What is Intersectionality?

This is the animation that has travelled further than anything else I’ve made. With over 980,000 views on YouTube and another 67,000 on Vimeo, more than a million in total, “What is Intersectionality?” has become a teaching staple for universities, governments and advocacy organisations around the world, explaining one of the most important and most misunderstood ideas in social theory in just a couple of minutes.

It was commissioned and produced by Professor Peter Hopkins at Newcastle University, with funding from the University’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Fund. Peter brought the research and the concept, and I created the design, animation and sound design, working to make a dense academic idea feel clear, warm and genuinely watchable for people meeting it for the first time.

The thing I’m proudest of is the company it keeps. It’s used as a course resource alongside the scholars who built the field: Green River College, for instance, lists it beside an interview with Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term, and a lecture by Patricia Hill Collins from Cambridge Sociology. The University of Alberta’s Institute for Intersectionality Studies features it on its explainer pages, and the University of Toronto’s Centre for Faculty Development hosts it in its resource hub for health professions education. For a short animation to sit next to the founders of intersectionality as a way in for new learners is the kind of reach I most hope for in this work.

It has also been adopted by organisations across education, government, healthcare and human rights. A small sampling includes:

• The HIV Justice Network (Amsterdam) in their online learning programme
• The International Centre for Human Rights (Toronto) for online training
• Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission
• The Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria (Australia), within an e-learning module tied to the Victorian Government’s framework for preventing violence against women
• The University of Florida’s Counseling and Wellness Center, for their Best Allyship Movement (BAM!)
• UMass Lowell, in bystander training under their NSF “Making WAVES” grant for women academics in STEM
• The Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists, in a micro-certificate on diversity and inclusion in healthcare
• St Luke’s Innovative Resources and Rainbow Health Victoria, in an introduction to LGBTQI-inclusive practice for Rainbow Tick accreditation
• The Government of Ontario’s Office of Women’s Issues, for equity-based intersectional training for government staff
• Veza Global, in a resource hub for tech companies across British Columbia
• Women With Disabilities Australia, on their “Our Place” rights site for women and girls with disability
• The Socially Engaged Art Salon’s “Intersections” exhibition for Brighton Pride
• An open-access textbook for Introduction to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

If you have a complex idea you’d like to make clear and shareable through animation, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.