Abstract
This article develops an innovative approach to intersectional biographical interviewing for researchers working with highly diverse, partly unknown populations and focusing on systems of intersecting inequality, rather than “groups” or “lists” of intersections. Drawing on fieldwork with Black and Muslim Italian migrants with different class backgrounds, the article discusses theoretical synergy as a tool to redraw analytical boundaries vis-à-vis emergent knowledge of intersecting inequalities, and to connect different analytical dimensions in biographical analysis. Moreover, I introduce field-specific questions as a technique that captures the contextual effects of intersecting inequalities, minimizing the risk of essentialising minority ethnic participants.
Keywords
Introduction
It might sound strange, but I felt more at home here [UK] in a week and a half than in Italy, even though I was born and grew up there.
Why did you feel like that?
Because it’s a much more multicultural country, for sure. There’s more tolerance, but more importantly, here you are valued for your skills, not for your ethnicity or religion. I remember when I arrived at the airport [in the UK], I saw a scene that, when I got back to Italy, I immediately told my dad about. I told him: “Dad, I saw English people doing heavy work at the airport, moving luggage in and out of aeroplanes. I saw Indian Sikhs, with turbans, working as heads of security.” I mean, it’s something I never saw in Italy. It was really a scene that impressed me.
I started my interview with Hana by asking why she moved to Britain. She initially explained that she wanted to pursue an undergraduate degree in a subject that in Italy, at the time (2017), was available only as a postgraduate qualification. Continuing her narrative, she brought up the issue of not feeling at “home” in Italy, where her “ethnicity” and “religion” mattered more than her “skills” (contrary to the United Kingdom) and where people racialized as non-white and non-Christian (“Indian Sikhs”) would rarely be employed as managers of white Italians. When we spoke, Hana had just started an undergraduate program in England, for which she needed a loan. She was also working as a part-time waitress to be partially independent of her parents, who migrated from Tunisia to Italy before she was born and who had working-class jobs in Italy.
Hana’s story—a Muslim Italian woman, with a migrant and working-class background, seeking opportunities for self-realization in Britain—is uncommon in academic debates about intra-European migration and European identities, which rarely include Black, Muslim and other minority ethnic Europeans (Barwick, 2018; El-Tayeb, 2011). Her story is also invisible in Italian public narratives about the new emigration that started with the 2008 economic crisis, as these narratives center on white graduates (Varriale, 2023). I met Black, Muslim and other minority ethnic Italian migrants in Britain serendipitously through fieldwork, but later made conscious efforts to include them in my research, which initially focused on class inequalities in post-2008 Italian emigration.
This article discusses how these encounters changed the methodological contours of my research and why debates about how to “do” intersectionality were not sufficient to deal with a “white” group of EU migrants which, during fieldwork, emerged as highly diverse and along social divisions that were scarcely documented in official statistics and academic literature. Debates on intersectionality and qualitative methods have sometimes advocated for flexible, contextually sensitive strategies of sampling (Cuádraz & Uttal, 1999). Yet, they have typically focused on what McCall (2005) called intracategorial intersectionality: the study of marginalized “groups” defined by the experience of (usually two) intersecting inequalities. The question of which intersections, or how many intersections, researchers should focus on when confronting unknown populations, higher degrees of complexity and wider geopolitical processes, such as South-to-North European migration, remains little discussed. Yet, these challenges are likely shared by researchers who work in contexts where the functioning of intersecting oppressions is not obvious, partly because they might work differently than in Anglo-American contexts—the main focus of intersectional theory (Rodó-Zárate, 2020)—and partly because transnational dynamics further complicate attempts at intersectional empirical analysis (Anthias, 2012).
This article shows how a “theoretical synergy” (Meghji, 2020) between different critical traditions can aid researchers confronting these challenges, bringing concrete methodological benefits to intersectional qualitative research. I will argue that this approach—beyond the specific mix of theories that I brought into my research—can be especially productive for researchers interested in moving from group-oriented to system-oriented intersectional analysis (Choo & Ferree, 2010; Walby, 2007), which, as I shall discuss later, addresses broader geographical and historical systems of inequality.
Drawing on my research with post-2008 Italian migrants, the article discusses how the synergy between Bourdieusian class analysis and critical-race/postcolonial studies of Southern Europe helped me revise my sampling strategy, interviewing style and analysis, affecting different stages of the research process. First, theoretical synergy allowed me to redraw analytical boundaries during fieldwork. Bringing together knowledge of different systems of inequality, it helped me develop a more historically sensitive approach to “multiple-case” selection (Small, 2009), as different critical theories privilege different histories of political and epistemic exclusion (Go, 2016). Second, theoretical synergy helped me connect different analytical dimensions in biographical interviewing. It allowed me to track how different institutional and interactional contexts mediated the effects of wider structural inequalities at different points of participants’ lifecourse. This approach minimized the risk of homogenizing minority ethnic participants (Eide, 2016). I will discuss how I developed field-specific interview questions to capture these dynamics.
The article proceeds as follows. The first two sections reconstruct the debate on intersectionality and qualitative methodologies, focusing on how biographical interviewing has been addressed in this context and the problems of conflating this method with group-oriented, intracategorial intersectionality (McCall, 2005). The third section introduces the research project on which this article is based, describing its initial design and the challenges that, during fieldwork, reoriented my approach. The fourth section focuses on questions of sampling and case selection. It discusses the benefits of theoretical synergy but also its challenges, particularly in terms of positionality, ethics, and resources. The fifth section focuses on interviewing style and analysis, exploring the notion of field-specific questions and how theoretical synergy can reorient the analysis of interview transcripts.
Methodological Intersectionality and the Problem of Complexity
The historical genesis of intersectionality remains debated. Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), the concept emerged during the 1980s from the long-standing work of Black feminist activists and scholars. It was devised to capture the multiple inequalities experienced by Black women in the United States, as their location “at the intersection” of racial, gender, and class oppression remained invisible not just in policy and legislation, but also in antiracist, feminist, and anticapitalist activism (Combahee River Collective, 1977/1981; Hill Collins, 2000; hooks, 1982). Some have argued that similar reflections on the interconnected nature of structural inequalities were emerging outside the United States around the same years (Anthias, 2012; Rodó-Zárate, 2020; Yuval-Davis, 2011), while others have stressed how, even in the U.S. context, reflection on similar problems existed well before the 1980s (hooks, 1982; Davis, 2014).
Debates on how to translate intersectionality’s insights into methodological practice have emerged later and in a different context, namely, with intersectionality becoming a “buzzword” across the social sciences and humanities (Davis, 2008) and hence more institutionalized, though still contested, in Western and Northern academia and policymaking (Hill Collins, 2019; Yuval-Davis, 2011). Discussions about what could be called methodological intersectionality have emerged out of uncertainties about how to translate intersectionality’s epistemic complexity into methodological strategies (Davis, 2014; Hancock, 2019; McCall, 2005). A rich discussion covering issues of theoretical definition has gone hand in hand with a discussion of more specific aspects of the research process, such as sampling and data collection (Cuádraz & Uttal, 1999; Windsong, 2018; Winker & Degele, 2011) and the impact of researchers’ positionality and reflexivity on the research process (Hamilton, 2020; Jones, 2015). Before moving toward a discussion of research design and practice, particularly in relation to biographical interviewing, it is necessary to disentangle the question of complexity and to take an explicit position about what kind of intersectional analysis this article aims to develop.
Several authors have discussed the challenge of capturing structural, institutional, and situational contexts, as well as temporal change, in analyses which are already concerned with a significant degree of complexity (as they typically focus on at least two intersecting systems of oppression). With the concept of “situated intersectionality,” Yuval-Davis (2015) highlighted that the workings of particular intersections are not a given, but require careful contextualisation and an understanding of the different ontological and historical contours of class, gender, race and other systems of oppression (see also Anthias, 2012; Weldon, 2008; Winker & Degele, 2011). Choo and Ferree (2010) reviewed different ways of “doing” intersectionality, making a distinction between group-oriented, process-oriented, and system-oriented intersectional analyses. While group-oriented analyses are concerned with giving “voice” and representation to intersectionally oppressed groups, process-oriented analyses focus not on specific groups, but on how structural variables (e.g., gender, class, and race) influence particular outcomes in different contexts, including for “unmarked” and privileged groups. While group-oriented and process-oriented analyses broadly correspond with McCall’s (2005) distinction between intracategorial and intercategorial intersectionality, respectively, system-oriented analysis is open to the possibility that the effects of intersecting systems of oppression are not limited to a particular group or context, but generate feedback loops and interdependencies across contexts, groups, and institutions (Walby, 2007; see also Yuval-Davis, 2015).
Hana’s story, introduced above, is useful to better understand the methodological implications of these theoretical distinctions. Hana could be seen as an individual “case” in a study of Muslim Italian migrant women and their motivations for emigration (group-oriented approach). In a process-oriented approach, Hana would be the participant in a comparative study addressing how structural inequalities of gender and religion affect the occupational and educational outcomes (or other dependent variables) of Italian migrants in the United Kingdom. A system-oriented approach, by contrast, would not limit the analysis of Hana’s story to a particular group, comparative design or parsimonious “list” of intersections, but would consider how different systems of oppression—including social class, as work and debt define Hana’s narrative from the start—affect Hana’s biography across time and space, with, potentially, different outcomes via-à-vis different temporal and spatial contexts (Weldon, 2008). Moreover, such an analysis would situate Hana’s experiences within interconnected systems of inequality (Walby, 2007) that are not immediately visible in her narrative, but which still shape her biography and identifications. These include Italianness, Britishness, and Europeanness as exclusionary group categories linked to unequal histories of European colonialism and capitalism, which feed into contemporary inequalities between and within “unequal Europes” (Boatcă, 2013; Varriale, 2023). From this perspective, Hana’s experiences are also relevant for understanding the experiences of white, male, middle-class Italian migrants. They reveal that Italian emigration is a system of unequal migrations embedded in global, historically stratified systems of inequality.
As I discuss in the next section, qualitative interviewing has been associated with group-oriented, intracategorial intersectional analysis (Davis, 2014; McCall, 2005, p. 1782; Walby, 2007, p. 452), as interview studies based on purposive samples have been central to the study of intersectionally oppressed groups. However, I argue that it is on the grounds of a system-oriented intersectional analysis that biographical interviewing, as a distinctive set of approaches to qualitative interviewing (see below), can prove especially effective.
Toward Intersectional Biographical Analysis
Biographical approaches to qualitative interviewing have a long history. This section does not provide an exhaustive discussion of different traditions (Erel, 2007; Suárez-Ortega, 2013) but focuses on how some of these have been deployed in methodological debates on intersectionality.
A key aim of biographical analysis, particularly in sociology and oral history, is to situate individual life stories within a structural and historical context. Although the relational and culturally mediated nature of biographical narratives has been widely recognized (Denzin, 1989; Plummer, 2001; Ruokonen-Engler & Siouti, 2016), social scientists have analyzed biographical narratives from a structural perspective (Erel, 2007). Different traditions, such as symbolic interactionism, feminist theory, and phenomenology, have recognized that class and gender inequalities affect both concrete biographical experiences and the cultural-linguistic resources individuals have access to when constructing biographical narratives (Denzin, 1989; Stanley, 1992). A structural reading of biographical talk has also been influential among social scientists interested in the subjective experience of class inequality and social mobility (Bertaux & Thompson, 1997; Friedman, 2016). It is within this tradition that I initially situated my project on class inequalities and post-2008 Italian migration.
Despite a long-standing debate on the links between biography and social structure(s), biographical interviewing remains peripheral in debates on intersectional methodologies. Cuádraz and Uttal (1999) drew on this tradition when arguing that different intersecting inequalities become relevant at different moments of individuals’ lifecourse. Christensen and Qvotrup Jensen (2012) argued that a focus on individual life stories makes it possible to turn theoretical debates about process-oriented analyses (discussed above) into practice, partly because of the temporal dimension of biographical analysis, and partly because it allows researchers to inductively explore the lived experience of intersecting inequalities, without asking participants direct questions about their identities (Windsong, 2018). Recently, Ferrer and colleagues devised an “intersectional lifecourse approach” to study the experience of intersecting vulnerabilities among aging racialized migrants (Ferrer et al., 2017). The authors showed how different contexts, levels of analysis and temporalities can be brought together through the analysis of individual case studies (see also Erel, 2007).
These contributions suggest, in different ways, that biographical analysis is especially suitable for tapping into the “complexity of intersectionality” (McCall, 2005), particularly its lived experience and its contextual and temporal variations. Yet, the strengths of biographical interviewing for system-oriented intersectional analysis remain ignored. As I discuss in the remainder of this article, biographical analysis can play a renewed role in research projects that approach intersectionality not as delimited to a particular group, context, or institution, but as “shaping the entire social system” (Choo & Ferree, 2010, p. 129), including patterns of global inequality, emigration, and immigration. The challenge, then, becomes to situate individual biographies in a broader historical and geographical analysis, and to find ways of empirically exploring “feedback loops” and “interconnections” between different national, institutional, and interactional contexts (Walby, 2007). This raises questions regarding design, recruitment, interviewing style, and analysis that have not been unpacked in the debates surveyed above.
Introducing the Field: Theoretical Synergy and Its Methodological Consequences
My research on post-2008 Italian migration started with a focus not on intersecting inequalities, but on social class, which has frequently been seen as more peripheral than gender and race in debates on intersectionality (McCall, 2005, p. 1788; Hill Collins, 2019, p. 18). The project drew on a Bourdieusian understanding of class. In this perspective, class is not solely about employment or income, nor is it about position in capitalist relations of production. It is about access to different forms of “capital” (Bourdieu, 1987). These include economic, cultural, and social capital. For Bourdieu, access to these resources is conditioned by family (class) background. The wealth and social connections inherited via family upbringing influence later life chances. Similarly, tacit knowledge, common sense and tastes (Bourdieu’s “embodied” cultural capital) provide structural advantages to the children of highly educated families in later educational and occupational trajectories (Bourdieu, 1984).
My initial interest was in the extent to which these classed “capitals” travel abroad, unlocking similar structural advantages in other national contexts. For this reason, my initial sampling strategy was theory-driven. I focused on recruiting Italian migrants who moved to Britain with different educational qualifications. These, in the Italian context, are good “proxies” of different class backgrounds, particularly if participants have high-school vocational qualifications, as opposed to “academic” high-school qualifications (Triventi, 2014). At this initial stage, I also planned to have a roughly equal gender balance and an age range that reflected the known demography of post-2008 Italian migrants (a majority of people in their 20s and 30s; ISTAT, 2021). While I anticipated that gender and age would emerge as relevant social inequalities during fieldwork, they were largely an “add-on” concern at the design stage.
During fieldwork, which lasted about a year and led to 57 interviews, a range of experiences “sensitised” me to unexpected issues (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 253–260):
I noticed the presence of individuals who were non-white or had “foreign” names in Facebook groups for Italian migrants living in Britain (my main channel of recruitment). As I learned later, these included “second generation” Italians (I unpack this concept later) like Hana, but also “first-generation” migrants who had spent several years in Italy and who, after obtaining Italian citizenship, had migrated again toward Northern Europe (Della Puppa & Sredanovic, 2017).
Later, early interviews with “second generation” Black and Muslim 1 Italian migrants revealed that experiences of racism in Italy were an important motivation for emigration. However, this was rarely participants’ only motivation. These interviews already revealed significant differences in family history, class background, ethnicity, religion, and gender (see next section).
Meanwhile, interviews with white participants frequently included allusions to the “desirability” of Italianness in Britain and, at the same time, to the problematic status of other racialized migrant categories, such as “Eastern Europeans,” “Muslims” and “refugees.”
Various intersections of class background, ethnicity, gender and age emerged as relevant also among white participants. For instance, experiences of occupational precarity were highly gendered and exacerbated by older age, class and regional background (for participants coming from the economically more disadvantaged Southern regions of Italy).
Taken together, these emerging “data” suggested the relevance of different intersecting inequalities for understanding post-2008 Italian emigration. They problematised dominant political representations of Italian emigration as a “brain drain” of young white graduates (Varriale, 2023).
However, this intersectional complexity posed significant challenges in terms of research (re)design, recruitment, positionality, ethics, and limited resources (which I unpack in the next section). During fieldwork, I found appeals to the openness and emergent character of theoretical sampling of limited use, despite this being a well-established defense of explorative qualitative research (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Small, 2009). Indeed, theoretical sampling did not solve the problem of how to manage a high degree of complexity without reducing it to a parsimonious list of categories (Hancock, 2019, p. 119), one for which I did not see a straightforward theoretical or socio-political justification. Moreover, the intersecting differences I was seeing “in the field” were scarcely documented in academic and policy literature (see also Franceschelli, 2022), making a purposive sampling strategy based on predetermined social categories rather arbitrary. For instance, official figures on Italian emigration have focused on broad education, age, and gender differences (ISTAT, 2021), but have largely ignored differences in ethno-racial and religious background, citizenship status, and class background.
During this period, interviews, participant observation and engagement with different theoretical literatures went hand in hand, in a way that risked becoming too “messy” even for the standards of explorative qualitative research. Authors discussing how to operationalize intersectionality for qualitative research have been sympathetic toward bottom-up, flexible approaches to the research process (Ferrer et al., 2017; Cuádraz & Uttal, 1999). This position recognizes the complexity of using intersectionality as a guiding principle for empirical research. However, it does not address the problems I was dealing with during fieldwork:
First, there was the problem of which intersections, and how many intersections, researchers choose to include as relevant, even when they are notionally open to unexpected encounters during fieldwork. This is a problem of analytical boundaries, which requires a historical and geopolitical justification, not simply a theoretical or practical position of openness.
Second, there was the problem of what counts as an “intersection” in biographical narratives. Are intersecting inequalities a property of individuals and groups, or a property of the contexts and social systems that participants experience? This is a problem of analytical dimensions (Anthias, 2012; Yuval-Davis, 2015)—how to define them theoretically and navigate them methodologically.
At the time of fieldwork, my understanding of intersectionality was limited to McCall’s (2005) distinction between intracategorial and intercategorial approaches, while debates on system-oriented intersectionality (which I encountered later) remain largely theoretical. Yet, I was not dealing with a subgroup of intersectionally oppressed Italian migrants (intracategorial analysis), nor did I want to limit my research to a parsimonious list of variables (intercategorial analysis). Both approaches would have missed a system of unequal migrations, one that I was encountering from the vantage point of different participants, for whom different intersecting inequalities were relevant (and relevant at different points of their lifecourse). Moreover, both approaches would have missed the embeddedness of Italian emigration in wider histories of race and global inequality. It is not accidental that white participants were especially aware of “other” migrant groups in Britain and that they drew on discourses of racial, ethnic, and class stigma that they had learned in Italy (and sometimes combined with “British” categories of stigma).
I argue that it is precisely the “messiness” of fieldwork—when one is trying to make sense of emerging data while reading across literatures—which makes “theoretical synergy” (Meghji, 2020) a valuable rationale for methodological (re)design. This concept, recently introduced in sociology, has not yet been brought into debates on methodological practice. I encountered this concept toward the final stages of analysis and writing. Hence, I use it retrospectively to make sense of choices that initially emerged as tentative adjustments, but which align with the concept’s epistemic premises (discussed below). The concept has the potential to help researchers approach in a more explicit and reflexive way challenges for which I—like others, presumably—needed to connect different bodies of theoretical, historical, and geographical knowledge. Moreover, it can contribute to legitimizing an approach to research (re)design that is more adequate for projects that aim to move toward a system-oriented intersectional analysis, while working with groups whose composition is highly complex and little documented.
Meghji (2022) recently proposed the concept of theoretical synergy to criticize sociology’s ambition of “synthesis,” namely, the assumption that it will become “proper” science only when a shared epistemology and theoretical language (a “theory of everything”) emerges from its fragmentation. By contrast, theoretical “synergy” has no synthetic ambition. It draws from the metaphor of “pluri-verse” (Mbembe, 2016), namely, the idea that knowledges emerged at different latitudes of the globe, and hence, endowed with unequal epistemic status, can complement each other to understand the complexity of particular phenomena. This opens the possibility of theoretical connections between different (Southern and Northern, Eastern and Western) critical theories, but without the assumptions of epistemic domination and “purity” implicit in the notion of synthesis. This idea is particularly useful in the context of intersectionality, given that intersectional scholars have emphasized the need for coalition-building between different critical theories and social justice projects (Hill Collins, 2019; Kerner, 2017; Yuval-Davis, 2015).
Methodologically, the notion of synergy can help intersectional empirical researchers to become more cognisant about the theoretical assumptions—and hence the geopolitical hierarchies and histories—that orient their methodological choices (as I expand on below). Moreover, it can bring different systems of oppression more clearly within the same analytical focus. Biographical interviewing can play a renewed role in this context. It has long been considered a method capable of capturing the connections between individual lives and social structures (Bertaux & Thompson, 1997). However, it cannot fully address the intersection of different structures without additional theoretical resources, especially without a clear orientation toward the histories and geographies of different systems of inequality. The following sections focus on how “theoretical synergy” can help orient methodological practice toward these questions.
Case Selection: Theoretical Synergy as a Rationale for (Re)Drawing Analytical Boundaries
How should participants be selected when, aside from the experience of emigration from the same country, they might share little else? Do we focus on the construction of subgroups, or do we try to locate individuals in broader intersecting systems of inequality? The latter option emerged not as a self-conscious approach to system-oriented intersectionality, but as a result of engagement with new theoretical resources, which reoriented case selection while bringing new practical and ethical challenges.
The different relationships of participants with ‘Italianness’—taken for granted by white participants, but symbolically and legally (see below) denied to Black and Muslim participants—pointed me toward literatures on race, citizenship, and colonialism in Southern Europe. This literature has adapted the theoretical insights of critical race and post/decolonial perspectives to Southern Europe’s distinctive histories of colonialism, nationalism, and racialisation. In Italy, in particular, anti-Black racism has been central to different stages of nation-building and imperial expansion (Pesarini, 2021). However, since the early 1990s, it has become tied to mechanisms of citizenship legislation that exclude children of migrants from legal Italian citizenship until they are 18 (and frequently for longer; Hawthorne, 2022, pp. 33–34). Moreover, the children of migrants remain perceived as “immigrants” even when they become legally “Italian,” experiencing systemic racism based on different sources of racialisation, including religion, skin color, and ethno-national background (Hawthorne, 2022; Oliveri, 2018). National histories of colonial amnesia further complicate this context: in Italy, the word “race” (razza) has been removed from political and everyday language since the end of Italy’s colonial empire in the 1950s. Racism is considered an “aberration” of the Fascist years (1922–1943) and a “problem” located elsewhere, in societies like the United States and United Kingdom (Mellino, 2012). Meanwhile, Italy has experienced a growing diversification of immigration since the 1980s (Lombardi-Diop & Romeo, 2015), which makes the experiences of migrants’ children significantly different vis-à-vis hierarchies of race, ethnicity, religion, and legal status.
This political and historical context emerged from the narratives of Black and Muslim participants in my research. Those with migrant parents could apply for Italian citizenship only at 18 (and, in one case, much later), sometimes experiencing legal discrimination and economic precarity. By contrast, participants from “mixed” families (with one parent with Italian citizenship) acquired Italian citizenship from their birth, as post-1990s citizenship legislation draws on the principle of ius sanguinis (“blood ties”). Participants also put different emphases on anti-Black racism and Islamophobia, depending on their religious and ethnic background (though some experienced both), while a lighter-skinned participant from a mixed background frequently “passed” as white. As I show below, these differences influenced participants’ understanding and experience of international mobility. Meanwhile, white participants were not excluded from this historical and geopolitical context. Their frequent remarks about the desirability of Italianness in Britain presumed the structural privileges of whiteness and were embedded within hierarchical understandings of more and less “desirable” groups, both in Britain and Italy.
Knowledge about these socio-historical dynamics progressively emerged through a dialogue between fieldwork and new readings, making it clear that by focusing on class I was not only implicitly focusing on whiteness (without problematising its workings), but also removing Italian emigration from geopolitical histories of race and citizenship. At the same time, class was not irrelevant to the experiences of Black and Muslim participants, not only because their parents, by moving to Italy, frequently experienced downward social mobility, but because a minority had parents with access to upper-middle-class forms of economic, cultural, and social capital.
Knowledge of these connected histories of race, citizenship, and class made sampling criteria much less ambiguous. By including a diverse group of Black and Muslim participants within a wider sample of (unequally positioned) participants, I could provide a more comprehensive representation of the systems of inequality in which Italian emigration is embedded. This increased the validity of my theoretical sample according to more transparent historical and geopolitical criteria. In practical terms, I tried to include as many Black and Muslim participants as possible, working against the limitations of being a white, male Italian migrant with no pre-existing connections with “second-generation” Italians (see further below). At the same time, I kept using educational inequalities as a proxy for class background.
This strategy, informed by a theoretical synergy between Bourdieusian class analysis and critical-race/postcolonial perspectives on Italy, did not aim to construct roughly equal subgroups. Rather, it selected participants according to a “multiple-case” logic. According to Small (2009), multiple-case selection, as opposed to sample selection, does not aim to be representative of particular subgroups, but rather seeks to produce in-depth knowledge of a wider social process. Italian emigration, as a process embedded in intersecting histories of oppression, emerged as highly unequal “in the field.” As a result, case selection became a way of documenting how these histories intersect in the lives of individual participants. Even white Italian migrants were not immune to such histories, as discussed above. By addressing intersecting inequalities as systemic rather than individual properties, this approach remained sufficiently flexible to address how gender and age operated in the biographies of participants with different ethno-racial and class backgrounds. However, encounters in the field were not sufficient to reorient case selection. I needed new theoretical resources—a synergy between different theoretical traditions—to develop a strategy with a clear historical and geopolitical rationale.
A brief discussion of the biographies of Hana (introduced at the start) and Eliza provides an example of the analytical paybacks of this strategy. Both Hana and Eliza indicated that the experience of being perceived as “not Italian” played a part in their decision to move to Britain. However, Hana focused on “ethnicity” and “religion” much more than Eliza, who emphasized “being Black” as a source of racialisation. Furthermore, they had different family histories and class backgrounds. Unlike Hana, Eliza did not need a loan to enroll on a British undergraduate degree course, as her parents were high-skilled professionals in Italy. Before starting her degree at a prestigious British university, she was considering other elite institutions in Europe and Italy (unlike Hana). Eliza jokingly told me about her mum’s reaction when she was rejected from an internationally renowned European university. This episode, presented as trivial, is revealing of the different class resources she had access to:
My mum was mad! She wanted to send tons of emails to the university to ask why they didn’t accept me. I told her “do as you like,” I don’t care to be honest, the only thing that would have been cool about [the institution in question] is that in the third year you can go to the US, as they have partnerships with Berkeley, Columbia . . . which isn’t bad, but I’m happier here [in the UK], maybe I’ll do an MA in the US.
Like Hana, Eliza discussed extensively how Italianness remains associated with whiteness. However, her migration to England was presented less as an escape and more as a logical stepping stone in a biography in which experiences of international mobility were normalized. Eliza did not need to work while studying either and, coming from a “mixed” family, never experienced legal exclusion from Italian and EU citizenship. These structural advantages shaped both the ease with which she imagined future international mobilities and the material conditions of her life abroad.
While theoretical synergy can bring concrete analytical paybacks, it can lead to significant practical challenges. Conducting multiple-case selection along multiple axes of inequality is likely to test the limits of researchers’ resources, positionality, and knowledge. This was certainly the case for me. In particular, recruitment of Black and Muslim Italian migrants raised the following practical and ethical considerations:
How to deal with a lack of personal connections with “second-generation” Italians (in Italy and Britain)?
Which language and terminology was the most appropriate for recruiting participants whose identifications, ethno-racial backgrounds, and citizenship status were far from obvious?
How to design recruitment messages in a context in which “race” and racism are rarely used as everyday categories?
My solutions to these dilemmas were tentative. However, by engaging, and thus developing synergy, with critical-race/postcolonial studies of Italy, I was able to make what I believe were more ethical and effective choices. In recruitment messages for circulation in Facebook groups, I framed the project as interested in providing an “inclusive” representation of Italian emigration, and asked specifically for “second-generation” participants, further defining them as “people of non-Italian descent but born or raised in Italy, who later moved to the UK.” In retrospect, this formulation was not without problems (the notion of “non-Italian descent” could have been replaced with a less-essentialist indication of the geographical backgrounds of the participants’ parents). However, the message tapped into some well-established linguistic and social conventions. It used ‘second-generation’—an established term in the Italian context, used also by activist and community groups (Ghebremariam Tesfaù & Picker, 2021; Hawthorne, 2022)—and it avoided razza, which, as discussed above, remains a contested concept (and would have been problematic in online spaces with white Italian migrants). The message was also sufficiently “fuzzy” to include participants with different histories of racialisation, citizenship status, and residence in Italy. 2
This approach produced a sample of 11 participants, which captured some relevant differences in ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds (Varriale, 2023). However, recruitment was considerably slower than with white Italian migrants, which suggests that being recognizable as a white researcher possibly prevented further participation. Moreover, having changed my recruitment strategy halfway through the fieldwork, I had less time to embed myself in relevant networks. Nonetheless, the interviews with Black and Muslim participants were extremely helpful in reconstructing the embeddedness of Italian emigration within broader systems of intersecting inequality. In this respect, I argue that an intersectional biographical analysis, if system-oriented, should aim to situate individual cases in a wider, relational “matrix of domination” (Hill Collins, 2000), rather than construct comparative, coherent “subgroups,” which might obscure other relevant differences (Hamilton, 2020) without necessarily providing a clear historical and geopolitical justification for case selection. In this context, it might be more effective to construct a theoretical sample of unequal biographies, combining the analytical depth of biographical analysis with the breadth of representation aided by different theoretical traditions. This enhances the validity of case selection in the context of a system-oriented intersectional analysis.
Field-Specific Questions: Theoretical Synergy as a Rationale for Connecting Analytical Dimensions
Theoretical synergy between different critical theories has implications not only for how we draw analytical boundaries. It can also positively influence interviewing style and analysis, enhancing a focus on intersectionality as a property of different contexts, rather than groups, and hence as a system-oriented analysis.
My initial approach to interviewing was influenced by biographical research on social mobility, particularly work which, drawing on Bourdieu, has paid attention to how individuals access different forms of capital across their lifecourse (Elliot, 1997; Erel, 2010). Drawing on this approach, I did not ask participants questions about their identities; rather, I asked questions that tapped into their choices at different points of their biographical trajectory (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 109–112). I started the interviews by asking about what participants were doing in Italy when they started thinking about moving abroad. I then encouraged them to reconstruct their migration experience, probing for examples when needed and asking relatively few questions, as I was interested in the participants’ own choices of framing.
However, I wanted to situate their migration experience within a wider biographical reconstruction. Hence, later in the interviews, I also asked questions about their family background and a range of “classed” life decisions, such as their choices of secondary and higher education. I progressively refined this approach by asking what I call field-specific questions. After participants had concluded their narrative of migration, I asked them to expand on their educational and professional trajectories and enquired about other “social fields” (Bourdieu, 1993) which were potentially relevant to their biographical trajectories, such as the making of new relationships abroad, their leisure activities and their experience of new educational and occupational contexts.
Bourdieu defined “social fields” as relatively institutionalized structures of relationships between actors endowed with different capitals (Bourdieu, 1993). While Bourdieu used this concept to indicate highly institutionalized social spaces (e.g., the family, the state bureaucracy, various professional fields), others have suggested that less-institutionalized relational spaces can also provide individuals with distinctive constraints and opportunities (Noble, 2013, p. 343). I used the notion of “field” in this broader sense. Field-specific questions thus became questions that “zoomed” into participants’ experience of specific spaces of relationships, such as workplaces, educational institutions, the family and networks of friendships and acquaintances.
The growing influence of intersectional, postcolonial, and critical race perspectives over my research did not significantly alter this approach to my interviewing style. However, it changed how I approached interview transcripts analytically, as I became more attentive to the contextual effects of intersecting systems of inequality. This allowed me to focus on how different fields of relationships afforded participants distinctive resources, shaping later biographical trajectories (see Andrew’s story below). In this respect, field-specific questions became a way of foregrounding issues of agency and individual change, while minimizing the risks of essentialism and homogenisation. This has been a long-standing issue of debate in postcolonial and critical race approaches, which have long challenged ideologies of biological and cultural essentialism (Combahee River Collective, 1977/1981; Hill Collins, 2000; Spivak, 1988). By contrast, many have advocated for “strategic essentialism,” which highlights shared structural oppression as a basis for political representation (Eide, 2016). Strategic essentialism, however, can inadvertently minimize social differences “within” oppressed groups (de Almagro, 2019; Yuval-Davis, 2015). It thus remains an ongoing issue of debate, including in geopolitical areas, such as Southern Europe, where Black and minority ethnic Europeans remain under-researched (Hawthorne, 2022).
Andrew’s biography provides an example of how field-specific questions can tap into intersections of race, class and gender in a way that minimizes essentialism while foregrounding the interplay between structure(s) and agency. Like Hana, Andrew spent considerable time discussing how racism shaped his decision to leave Italy. While his class background was comparable to Hana’s (his parents were migrants from Africa with working-class jobs in Italy), his experience of school education in Italy presented distinctive features. Research on educational inequalities in Italy shows that children of migrants tend to be over-represented in less-prestigious, “vocational” high-school tracks (Azzolini et al., 2019). Andrew went through a similar track in Italy. However, he was not considering jobs aligned with his studies when we met. Since he had developed some experience as a theater actor during high school, he was attending a free acting workshop in London and was considering enrolling in an acting school (while working full-time in a warehouse).
Scholarship on educational inequalities would be unable to capture Andrew’s interest in theater, given its historical association with middle-class and white privilege (Bourdieu, 1984). However, his interest in theater can be understood by using field-specific questions and by reading his biographical narrative through a synergy between Bourdieu’s social theory and intersectional theory. When I asked Andrew how he became interested in acting, he evoked different fields of relationships, which influenced the genesis of his interest. As he explained:
As a child, he had a fascination with movies and actors but “never thought about entering that world.”
Years later, he started volunteering with a charity that helped children of migrants with their homework. He decided to do this because “my neighbour [an Italian woman with whom his mum became friends] helped me for five years with my homework.” He considered this help as crucial for his later education and wanted to help others (“luckily I had this possibility [. . .] otherwise it would have been really difficult”].
He volunteered for the charity. He had been there a few years when the charity asked for volunteers to participate in a short film about the work the charity did with children.
The following year, the short-film director started running free acting workshops in Andrew’s school and, when he saw Andrew, he encouraged him to join.
Initially, Andrew was reluctant to join the acting workshops. As he explained: “I didn’t want to do it because . . . if I had done acting, my friends would have ridiculed me, so to speak, because at school I was . . . kind of popular, and acting, in that school . . . it was like something for losers.”
The director, however, insisted. Andrew took “three months” to think about it. He eventually tried one session, and while he found it intimidating, his feelings progressively changed (“we did some scenes, some practice, and I liked it, it was becoming interesting [. . .] so I said OK, I’ll come next week, then I liked it again, and it went on and on”).
By asking a field-specific question about how Andrew’s passion for theater developed, I tapped into the relationships and interactions across the fields of family, neighborhood, volunteering, and school that generated and sustained his interest. This was significant for understanding his later migration, as he was looking for opportunities to develop his acting skills further (despite having limited access to economic and social capital in London).
This example shows how theoretical synergy between Bourdieu’s field theory and intersectional theory allowed me to explore the interplay between context-specific relational dynamics and structural forces of class, race, and gender. Racialized and classed exclusions from cultural capital were central to Andrew’s narrative about how and why he started volunteering for the charity. Moreover, his reluctance to join the acting workshop, and the contrast he evoked between acting (an activity for “losers”) and being “popular” at school, revealed the power of traditional (working-class) notions of masculinity, which potentially cast acting as a “feminine” activity. Our conversation also revealed that Andrew predominantly had “white friends” at school and tended to avoid other non-white kids. As he put it, he discovered his “Black brothers” in London in particular. Arguably, the possibility of being ridiculed by his schoolmates included racialized anxieties about being accepted by white Italian peers.
While Bourdieusian social theory allowed me to tap into field-specific dynamics, my progressive engagement with intersectional, postcolonial, and critical race perspectives transformed the role of field-specific questions in my research. They became a tool to counter the risks of essentialism, particularly when interviewing Black and Muslim participants, and to connect micro and meso relational dynamics to wider structural relations, thus exploring different analytical dimensions of intersectionality (Anthias, 2012).
Conclusion
This article has argued that the logic of theoretical synergy (Meghji, 2020) has methodological implications that are highly productive for intersectional qualitative analysis, particularly for developing an approach to intersectional biographical interviewing that focuses on “systems” of intersecting inequality, rather than “groups” or “lists” of intersections.
Drawing on my research with post-2008 Italian migrants, I have discussed how theoretical synergy between different critical traditions helped me redraw analytical boundaries during fieldwork—in relation to the unexpected intersectional complexity of Italian migration—and connect different analytical dimensions in biographical analysis. This allowed me not only to include Black and Muslim Italian migrants with different class backgrounds (which remain excluded from public representations of Italian and European migration) but also to reconstruct a complex system of unequal migrations. By synergising between Bourdieusian class analysis and critical-race/postcolonial studies of Southern Europe, I was able to draw analytical boundaries not solely around social class, as initially intended, but around all the systems of intersecting inequality that emerged (unevenly) from participants’ narratives, including race, citizenship, gender, and age (Varriale, 2023). This made it possible to develop a more historically and contextually sensitive approach to multiple-case selection (Small, 2009), enhancing the validity of theoretical sampling.
Furthermore, theoretical synergy provided a rationale to connect different analytical dimensions of participants’ biographies: from interactional and institutional “fields” (Bourdieu, 1993) to systems of race, class, and gender inequality. By developing a new interviewing technique (field-specific questions), I was able to explore the contextual effects of wider intersecting inequalities and the interplay of structure(s) and agency at different moments of participants’ life course. This minimized the risk of essentialising ethnic minority participants (whose experiences were shaped also by other inequalities and privileges) and made it possible to “zoom” into the constraints and opportunities provided by different fields of relationships.
More broadly, the article has discussed how theoretical synergy can support researchers working with highly diverse, partly unknown populations, and interested in reconstructing broader systems of intersecting inequalities, rather than focusing on clearly defined groups or closed lists of variables (Choo & Ferree, 2010). This can assist researchers in developing answers to the question of “how many intersections” their analysis can and should handle that are not only more creative but also clearer and more rigorous. Theoretical synergy can help researchers provide justifications for their methodological strategies that are grounded in historical and geopolitical criteria, which frequently remain hidden as pretheoretical assumptions. I have argued that this is more effective than simply advocating for flexible, context-specific approaches to the research process, because notional openness still needs to be directed toward relevant intersecting inequalities, and how to define “relevance” is a problem that requires a combination of theoretical, historical, and geopolitical knowledges.
This article has employed theoretical synergy as a reflexive tool to re-evaluate choices of redesign that I made during fieldwork. However, future work might use it as a tool for research design, and hence from the early stages of the research process. This could make practitioners more reflexive toward the geographies, histories, and theories that are relevant to the context(s) of their research. Researchers working with biographical methods could also use the notion of synergy to further develop an intersectional and system-oriented approach to biographical analysis. While the article has focused on biographical interviewing, it raises questions of design, fieldwork, and analysis that are relevant for qualitative researchers at large, particularly those interested in intersectional theory and broader synergies between theory and empirical research.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The fieldwork on which this article is based was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
