The Transformative Power of Intersectionality: Why the U.S. Needs More Critical Psychology NOW! 

The U.S is in a disquieting era of exacerbating social, health, and economic precarity and inequity; but not for the minority of people with outsized power and staggering wealth.  Critical psychology, with its critique of power, attention to social inequality, interrogation of mainstream psychological theories and methods, and explicit commitment to social justice, has flourished in Europe, Australia and South Africa.  But not in the U.S., where most undergraduate psychology majors and even doctoral psychology students graduate with no exposure to critical psychology or critical frameworks such as intersectionality. 



Feminist, gender, LGBT, and community-focused fields of psychology have long recognized and embraced intersectionality as a vital framework for analyzing how social-structural factors (e.g., laws, policies, institutional practices) rooted in interlocking systems of oppressions (e.g., racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation) constrain opportunities for health and wellbeing, particularly for people from historically oppressed groups. But why has U.S. mainstream psychology lagged so far behind?  And why is the epistemic exclusion of intersectionality in mainstream psychology more of a feature than a bug?  Informed by questions such as these, this keynote will explore what U.S. mainstream psychology misses when it ignores critical frameworks such as intersectionality, describe the transformative power of intersectionality for the discipline, and spotlight what’s at stake if U.S. mainstream psychology fails to get more critical.