Intersectionality Meets Infrastructure: Recruitment Matrices and Identity Overflow in Just Research

Abstract

This paper traces intersectionality’s theoretical-methodological “twists and turns” to reconsider its explanatory power in elucidating relations between selves and socialites and its application in research. Questions of how researchers take up the heuristic have become charged given intersectionality’s uptake by democratic institutions as a marker of excellence alongside critiques of its appropriation by systems advancing it. Adopting a processual-relational framing, we argue that difference represents a site of possibility—affirming life’s heterogeneity—and danger, exposing the unboundedness of monolithic identities upon which intersectional theorizing relies through misfitting/fracturing. This reveals intersectionality’s potential as infrastructure. Using an “infrastructural inversion” that makes the hidden work of intersectionality-as-infrastructure perceptible, we demonstrate how an infrastructural critique uncovers the socio-material implications of classification systems underpinning intersectionality. We approach research matrices as “wild containers” illuminating nondominant differences, suggesting this enables a decolonized understanding of intersectionality as inter-/intra-sectional becomings moving beyond hierarchical categorizations imposed by white supremacist thought.

Intersectionality as “Wild Cage”

“Is there anything else you want the research team to know?” This comprised the last question posed of 70 potential participants in an online recruitment survey for a project called Artistry Under the Table: D/deaf and Disabled Artists’ Livelihoods (hereafter, Artistry Under the Table) that, in 2020, explored how disabled artists survive and thrive under deadly capitalist conditions in Canada, a settler nation on the Northern landmass known in Anishinaabe as Turtle Island (K. Collins et al., 2023a, 2023b, 2025; Rice et al., 2025). Our pre-recruitment information gathering revealed that some groups remain underrepresented in the disability arts and culture movement on Turtle Island, including Deaf, Indigenous, and intellectually disabled people, and those whose lives encompass these and other intersections (Jones et al., 2022, 2025; LaMarre et al., 2021). With an understanding that leaving the category of disability unmarked would bias toward mainstream respondents and following literature that demonstrates the need to “call in” groups (Trần, 2016), we implemented a “recruitment matrix” to ensure our research represented people living with body-mind difference from underrepresented groups, and that interlocuters could rework gender, disability, and other identity categories according to their needs and desires. We designed our open-ended recruitment matrix to respond to the complexity of subjectivity in relation to social forms, recognizing critiques of intersectionality’s operationalization in research and policy (e.g., Hunt, 2012), a theme our paper takes up. Artist Sonny Bean transposes our information-gathering process in a visual metaphor of an orderly garden (Figure 1), which as our decolonized image descriptions indicate, divides and categorizes difference, human and/as plant.

Figure 1.

Contained Wild Cage © 2024 by Sonny Bean Is Licensed Under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Using an online survey, we asked those interested to identify themselves as d/Deaf and/or hard of hearing, intellectually disabled, living with disability/body-mind difference, persons of color, and/or Indigenous. Whether or not potential participants identified according to these categories, when asked if there was anything else they wanted us to know, almost all elaborated on a plethora of identities: “I am a mad illustrator of colour,” one wrote; “I pass for white but I don’t identify as white,” another told us; a third called themselves “a hard-of-hearing craft witch with chronic pain”; and a forth clarified: “I am a neurodivergent actor and filmmaker who identifies as fat, queer, and disabled.” Of the 20 folks interviewed, each used this question to stretch our offered identity categories by describing themselves, among other ways, as chronically ill, Muslim, two-spirited, immigrant, and mixed-race. Ultimately, our presupposed target categories could not capture the dynamism of identities and differences these artists used to describe themselves. They named so many differences that these overflowed, expanding beyond the scope of our institutionally-sanctioned recruitment materials.

This identitarian overflow reminded us of Lois Weinberger’s public art, namely his sculpture installed at Joanneumsviertel in Graz, Austria that resembles a lively caged nature reserve in the city’s center. The exhibit, “Wild Cage,” comprises an enclosure wherein vegetation spontaneously grows without human intervention, which is “explicitly blocked” (Meyers, 2019, p. 139). Part of a series of works that encage plots of earth to allow weeds, shrubs, wildflowers, and other life to emerge and reach beyond their encasement, this “counter-garden” heralds the creation of new ecologies that come to be because of—and critically, in spite of—their human-made enclosure, provoking new ways of thinking about gardens (and about categorization-as-enclosure itself). In considering the identitarian enclosures that our recruitment materials and research protocols generally tend to produce, we suggest that identity categories operate much like “Wild Cage”—orderly identity-based enclosures that inevitably overflow with difference, provoking new ways of thinking about who we humans (and other life) are becoming. In response, Bean offers a renewed illustration of our process below (Figure 2). Following Bean’s second image, which visually depicts our recruitment process as a bountiful overflow of identity categories using a garden metaphor that Weinberger’s work also inspires, this paper explores the infrastructure of intersectionality and the overflow of identity amid the mobilization of intersectionality-as-infrastructure in research.

Figure 2.

Overflowing Wild Cage © 2024 by Sonny Bean Is Licensed Under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

In the 30 plus years since Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989; 1991) first proposed intersectionality to expose the limits of single-axis approaches to anti-discrimination law/policy/praxis, researchers have experimented with translating the theory into methodology with uneven effects. Considering critiques of these translations alongside our own varied research experiences with intersectional praxis, we argue for intersectionality’s continued relevance through research infrastructures that acknowledge and analyze their own processualism—that is, their failure to capture life’s volatility/changeability in a dynamically entangling, ever-becoming world (and thus any schema’s failure to capture difference). If we orient to categories and classification systems as attempts to put human order on the ungovernable, they will always fail to capture everything in its aliveness and inherent entanglement. Distinct from identity categories used to sort humans, we orient to difference as emergent/becoming—as that which has not been captured or eludes capture by classification systems acting as infrastructures. At the same time, if understood as containers that create space for difference to take root, then identitarian categories acting as containers and connectors (Bowker & Star, 1999)—in other words, as infrastructures—might be rethought as fertile pollinators that seed diverse expressions of life within an open system that welcomes non-normativity as fundamental to its surviving and thriving.

Positionality and Context

We come together as four interdisciplinary scholars who live multiple non-dominant differences and occupy shifting spaces of othering and belonging. Depending on time and place, some of us have reaped the rewards of occupying certain majoritarian positions (of whiteness, ableness, cisness, or straightness, for example) while all have embodied or lived in intimate proximity with other minoritized differences, including those coded as racial, physical, mental, sexual, and more. These lively positionings give us glimpses into how categorization can render people’s most consequential differences undiscoverable and leave little space to theorize power’s dynamism in the social field. Working within the colonial context of Canada, we further note how intersectionality comprises a significant criterion for receiving state funding to conduct research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), and increasingly, in the health and natural sciences. Federal research funding in Canada operates as a major evaluative yardstick insofar as it drives the direction of institution-based inquiry, including qualitative and quantitative research across the country. Given concerns about appropriation that these policy moves have provoked and taking seriously roadmaps for engaging ethically with intersectional theory that racialized scholars have advanced (Ahmed, 2012; Bilge, 2020), we move in step with Black feminist scholar Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) who calls on non-Black feminist researchers to assume “the position of a front or defensive line against academic extractivism” including against a system that seeks to remove Black women from their own cannon, namely, intersectionality studies (p. 2320). Following King’s ethical (and epistemological) challenge (see also King, 2017), we attend to recent shifts (2010–2024) in intersectionality theorizing that have methodological implications to reconsider the varying effects of mobilizing the heuristic in research. Rejecting research agendas that have the effect of treating Black feminist knowledge as an “empty vessel openly vulnerable to the whims of the (academic) world . . . through which other agendas are shored up” (Bilge, 2020, p. 2320), we analyze how intersectionality’s “twists and turns” matter to justice-focused research praxis. In this project, we also attest that ableism, as a launching point for our collective work, operates a tool of masculinist white supremacy (e.g., where evaluative measures such as intelligence quotient [IQ] and body mass index [BMI] buttress systemic racism and misogyny) that we navigate to varying success within a system of higher education that remains saturated in “academic ableism” (Dolmage, 2017). We conclude by questioning the utility of recruitment matrices as our tool of choice for intersectional analysis.

Until recently, standards set by the US government in concert with its major research funding bodies have supported the integration of intersectional approaches into the research enterprise. In the wake of a far-right takeover of the United States government, the current administration has flagged all Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA)-related research, including studies tagged as intersectional, for funding review and termination, placing the heuristic’s future in jeopardy (Yourish et al., 2025). Not only are funded researchers now prohibited from folding intersectionality into research design, but broader organizational attempts to put intersectionality-related findings into practice via DEIA policies are themselves being criminalized (Kim, 2025). While the Canadian political context differs sharply from the US one, political dogma foisted on US-based researchers to cease equity-oriented research buttresses fascistic political desires to exploit/exacerbate the very fear of difference that DEIA policies intend to redress. This profoundly concerning development makes our paper’s intervention ever more urgent, as it calls for leaning into difference as a counterpoint to the kinds of mono-world-making that authoritarian regimes so desperately desire (Eco, 2020). Furthermore, given the position of the United States as a global superpower that has set international standards for research excellence and given its geographic position as neighbor to Canada and ally to liberal democracies elsewhere, such virulent anti-DEIA/anti-intersectionality rhetoric has spilled across many borders, infiltrating the collective zeitgeist throughout the Euro-West and potentially, we fear, rendering DEIA-related expectations increasingly tenuous within our context as well.

Despite these deeply unwelcome developments, our academic contexts, like those in other liberal democracies, still advance intersectionality-informed approaches as the sine qua non of research excellence. In 2021, for example, the federal funding research agency for the SSH in Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), released new criteria for equity, diversity, and inclusion in research design (known as EDI-RD), which centrally involved devising protocols that consider intersectionality (Government of Canada, 2021). This policy directive has followed widespread, informal, and often vague shifts in institutional knowledge production toward intersectionality as a necessary feature of quality research in Canada. Yet the pressures to produce such research are understandably met with suspicion by some intersectionality experts. As leading intersectionality scholars (Bilge, 2020; Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Nash, 2019) remind us, (non)performing intersectionality via research risks appropriating intersectionality, disavowing its origins, and reproducing the problems (e.g., white supremacy) that the analytic is meant to critique. For at least a decade prior to SSHRC’s EDI-RP directives, we have strived to make intersectionality a living part of our research including through recruitment matrices. Drawing on one study conducted through the Re•Vision Center, an arts-based research hub with which we each affiliate at the University of Guelph, we built this matrix to center minoritized perspectives and register the heterogeneity of community experiences in our Center’s publicly- and pedagogically-oriented research. In brief, we create recruitment matrices using online surveys administered during the recruitment phase of a project, designed for participants to self-identify in such a way that makes it possible for researchers to include underrepresented people in knowledge production. With an understanding that leaving categories such as d/Deaf, intellectually disabled, person of color, or Indigenous otherwise unmarked would create a bias toward mainstream respondents (white, abled, middle class), we implement recruitment matrices to ensure that we privilege perspectives of people from underrepresented groups in whatever the research, such that researchers and participants can together rework the identity categories named in the matrix, as necessary. In other words, the intention is to create a moment where taking a snapshot of intersectionality’s dynamism in people’s lives might be possible.

This move responds to our attunement as critical scholars to the need to prioritize intersectionality in inquiry in ways that, we hope, enact policy directives around intersectionality in careful, or ethically and politically considered ways. Though intersectionality offers powerful analytical and potentially transformative possibilities for tracing the complex convergences of unequal structures and relations of power, Rice et al. (2019) have pointed out that some researchers activate intersectionality as part of a social justice ambition without engaging in its complex Black and racialized feminist genealogies. This often results in a lengthy list of the identity categories—race, class, gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, nationality, ability, and other socially meaningful markers of difference—with little analysis of how the forces that produce these might converge/collide to co-constitute shifting experiences of power, privilege, and oppression. Taking recruitment as a key moment in research and recruitment matrices as fraught tools available for such a moment, we review critical conversations around the now well-cited roots of theorizing intersectionality and its use in justice-focused research. Knowing there is a lack of consensus about what intersectionality is and about what methods might “do justice” to the heuristic rather than undo the justice-desiring intentions at intersectionality’s core (Bilge, 2013; Harris & Patton, 2019), we tread through key discussions that intersectional scholars have identified as vital to intersectionality’s continued movement. Following Nash’s (Nash 2019) call to take seriously critiques of intersectionality, we connect these discussions to Artistry Under the Table not only to dwell in the tensions around intersectionality in/as infrastructure but further to reflect on how these matter to methodological design and praxis.

Intersectionality’s Lively Genealogies and Infrastructures

Since research funding bodies began to tout intersectionality as a “best practice” for achieving equity in research team make-up, protocol design, and analysis, the concept has gained currency across disciplines and epistemic divides. Even a cursory search shows that the number and kinds of scientific studies engaging conceptually or methodologically with intersectionality within fields as far flung as engineering, biology, sustainability science, medicine, pediatrics, animal science, and public health yields hits in the hundreds of thousands. ¹ The confounding political pressures placed on researchers untrained in critical theory to either integrate the analytic into their methodologies (in line with democratic institutional policies) or to expunge it entirely (in the case of anti-democratic ones) as a condition of funding brings to the fore larger questions about intersectionality’s uptake and treatment in research processes. In the wake of intersectionality’s adoption or abjection as a policy directive, it has become important from a critical perspective to interrogate researcher engagement with the heuristic in protocol design, analyses and beyond, and to that end, we analyze tools we have developed that integrate intersectionality and its desire for justice as a living part of our research. From our vantage point, “doing justice” to intersectionality in research design, qualitative or quantitative, must entail creating enough space for differences to emerge and become while simultaneously creating enough coherence for knowledges, policies, and practices to take shape that speak to the most affected without encasing, reifying, or ossifying them.

Intersectionality’s Lively Genealogies

Debates referencing intersectionality’s genealogy have become so lively that its historiography has almost become a field of its own (Alexander-Floyd 2013). Genealogical debates do not so much pivot on getting intersectionality’s history “straight” (P. H. Collins & Bilge, 2020, p. 59), as they do on the ontological significance of various versions of this history to contemporary praxis of intersectionality in and outside research. Nash (2019) describes her entry into historicizing intersectionality as one that came with “a sense of caution and an awareness of the potential risks of fetishizing history as the preferable orientation toward understanding intersectionality’s varied work” (p. 6). She argues that a “defensiveness” has come to mark contemporary Black feminist writing on intersectionality, which manifests through Black feminism’s proprietary attachments to the concept. In offering this critique, however, Nash also points out that in positioning Black feminists as intersectionality’s defenders, the academy also obliges those same scholars to defend against the concept’s misuse to sustain a place for Black and women of color feminist thought within the institution. Indeed, researchers who deploy intersectional analyses oftentimes fail to capture the intricacies of intersectional arguments because their disciplinary-specific frameworks do not allow them to think about identities beyond monistic and monolithic interpretations (May, 2015). This suggests the need to pay closer attention to the history of how work by Black, Indigenous, and women of color academics is interpreted and to how scholars who miss intersectional thinking in their training might fail to recognize social problematics and power dynamics along more than a single-axis line.

Related to tensions over intersectionality’s lively genealogy are uncertainties over how to do intersectional research. We have observed knowledge and policy makers repeatedly label intersectional research as a “challenge”—for a field, for a method, and for researchers unsure about the ethics of using intersectionality in research processes not centered on or conducted by Black and racialized women (Haynes et al., 2020, p. 753). Like other intersectional scholars, we have also witnessed how researchers may hold experiential knowledge of living multiple nondominant differences but struggle to articulate that experience theoretically and to clarify for themselves what constitutes doing justice to and with the intersections methodologically (Harris & Patton, 2019). For example, some scholars have pointed to intersectionality’s frequent appearance in institutional diversity agendas (Ahmed, 2012) that describe commitments to social justice with little regard for intersectionality’s foundations in Black feminist scholarship and justice movements. In our view, it is vital to consider the institutional contexts and histories under/in which we teach, theorize, fund, and normalize research including intersectional praxis in research. Doing research in ways that do not undo intersectionality’s desire for justice requires consideration of the discursive-material contexts in which research takes place. Studying the uptake, integration, and impacts of folding intersectionality into research processes emerges as central to scholarly critiques of the commodification, appropriation, and even theft of the concept by mainstream scholars and institutions of higher education and one of our prime motivations for writing this paper (Bilge, 2013, 2020; Nash, 2019).

Tracing the lively genealogy of intersectionality’s uptake in Black, women of color, and decolonial feminist thought, we note, too, that scholars working at the nexus of intersectionality, queer, and decolonial theories (Carastathis, 2016; Rice et al., 2020; Velez, 2019) have convincingly argued that intersectionality’s structuralist roots delimit the kinds of analyses it can offer. When approached as an analytic, for example, some have found that intersectionality does a better job at elucidating how power/oppression reproduce themselves through pre-existing categories (gender, disability, race) than at illuminating ways that hegemonic forces use categorization as a mechanism of governance or how people so encased remake categories and build new worlds (e.g., inventing the term “misogynoir” to language racialized misogyny, [M. Bailey & Trudy, 2018] or reclaiming the word “crip” [Chen et al., 2023; Kafer, 2013] to revalue the difference that disability makes).

Indeed, one of the earliest, most potent critiques leveled at intersectionality comes from Latina feminist philosopher Maria Lugones. Calling into question the categorical logics that underpin Crenshaw’s analytic, Lugones (1994) rejects visual descriptors like “interlocking” and “intersectional” since these metaphorically invite thinking about identities as entirely “discrete things” (p. 459); instead, she favors “enmeshed” and “intermeshed” to illustrate the visceral-material inseparability of differences as they are lived from an embodied vantage point. She theorizes mestizaje existence (the fusing of African, European, and Indigenous identities/cultures in Latin America) as “impure” resistance against intersecting oppressions imposed by colonial regimes including an exclusionary white abled masculinist or “pure” vision of the human subject (Lugones, 1994, p. 459). Using metaphors of a badly-separated egg or curdled mayonnaise (substances that only partially coalesce), she argues that attempts to split things into pure categories (e.g., attempting to define the species standard for man or woman, or for a white or Black person) also subjects those things to control, whereas that which cannot be split remains “impure, curdled [and] multiple”—resistant to classifying as a mode of domination (Lugones, 1994, p. 460).

Lugones’ critique pivots on the idea that colonial forces have constructed non-white identities in singularly oppressive ways, including by establishing knowledge regimes that delimit those identities as historically unchanging, atavistic, and consisting of essential qualities. Qualities “given” to Others emerge from and are often in tacit comparison to the universalized rendering of the human being—a white, masculinist, abled, propertied, cis-heterosexual mythical normative being that western thought has made species typical. Decolonial feminist thought exposes how colonial systems wield a hegemonic standard that equates white abled masculinist with human experience, casting all embodiments outside its bounds as impure, partial, other—requiring control, assimilation, or elimination to further a colonial-capitalist-eugenic vision of the human species. To disrupt these oppressive relations/rationalizations, decolonial feminist scholarship advances an affirmative over a deconstructive method that locates possibilities for decolonial praxis in recuperating and revaluing expressions of selves and worldviews marked by the very qualities that colonial systems debase: embodied-ness, emplaced-ness, ambiguous-ness, emotional-ness, and living in generative relations with “all of creation” (Simpson, 2017).

Juxtaposing western object-oriented with subaltern relationally-oriented understandings of reality helps to expose a fundamental contradiction between epistemologies endorsed by each (de Sousa Santos, 2015; Simpson, 2018): Indigenous and subaltern thought orients to the world in relational or processual terms, where all things are interconnected and where emphasis is placed on how things affect each other or on the quality of the connection rather than the essence of the things connecting (Coulthard & Simpson, 2016; de Sousa Santos, 2015; Simpson, 2018); in contrast, western epistemologies seek to know things by reducing them to essences (positivism, structuralism) or failing that, to disappear them by holding them outside what can be known (post structuralism, critical realism) (Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016). Notably, Lugones and Crenshaw also have very different takes on what difference is and how it is lived: while Crenshaw roots her theorizing of life at sites of overlapping structural inequities that give rise to stable identities (race, gender) as a basis from which to critique liberal legal theory, Lugones draws on mestiza and later on decolonial feminist perspectives to develop an entirely non-western theory of subject formation at sites of multiple difference. She emphasizes not the reproduction of devalued identities through structures invisible to western law (as does Crenshaw in the structuralist tradition), and not people’s discursive understandings of their own embodied practices as conformity and resistance to normative subjects (which post-structuralism might do); instead, she affirms differences—aspects of colonized subjectivities and lives which colonial systems have not managed to erase or suppress—as potent sites of resistance. Lugones’ (2010) decolonial feminist thought critiques identitarian logics underpinning intersectionality for their limited engagement with what she calls the “colonial difference” (p. 743). Here difference does not denote colonialism’s pejorative notions of Indigeneity or gendered/racial/sexual/physical alterity imposed onto colonized subjects (for difference is not an identity); rather, it refers to affirmative expressions of being that colonial systems have not managed to suppress—those non-modernist, non-masculinist, non-ablest, and non-gendered, or feminine- and crip-coded ethics of communalism, mutual aid, being-in-relation, and living well together that colonized peoples have practiced since before contact to secure their survival.

Thus far, we have made the case that an “old” materialist or a decolonized approach to intersectionality opens conceptual-methodological possibilities for questioning colonialism’s categorical logics that hierarchically enshroud and order life. Of note, so too do we make the claim that “new” materialist approaches that reframe intersectionality through processual-relational theoretical lenses also capture the ongoing processes of subject and social formation in more mutable, relational, and difference-affirming ways than the metaphor of intersection. For queer theorist Jasbir Puar (2012), as an example, humans are not made up of separable categories whose intersections with systems can be precisely predicted; and nor are they static or made only through the social. Following Giles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti, Puar (2012) and critical methodologists who have followed in her footsteps instead recast the intersection as “assemblage”—a provisional arrangement made through bodies metamorphosing in and through broader social, historical, and material forces. Thus while an intersectional framework (from inter meaning between, among groups) might view identities as discrete categories that get produced/reproduced in stable structures, an intra-sectional one (intra meaning inside, within) draws from processual-relational ontologies such as old (Indigenous/decolonial) and new (feminist philosophical) materialist ones that orient to subjects in emergent, entangled, embodied, and embedded terms as coming to be through shifting symbolic, structural and organic forces that co-shape their materialization (Rice, 2018; Rice et al., 2020). In a processual-relational framing, difference emerges as a site both of possibility through affirmation of life’s heterogeneity and of danger through exceeding, misfitting, and fracturing monolithic identities in ways that expose the leakiness, messiness, and unboundedness of categories. This is precisely the untapped possibility of intersectionality acting as infrastructure, as we explore in this paper.

A new/old materialist reading further implicates the intersections not only as embodied but also as embedded or emplaced—as made in and through material, nonhuman worlds where bodies are impacted by and are themselves impacting their own communities and place. A decolonized intersectionality works to disrupt white settler logics that orient to land in extractive, instrumentalizing, and commodifying ways that erase Indigenous, Black, and other racialized peoples’ otherwise relationalities with their living environments (King et al., 2020). A decolonized reframing of intersectionality recognizes the entanglement of land and lineage with self/nation, revising the analytic to recognize the force of place-based relationalities with human and earthly forces in shaping subjectivities and collectivities (Rice et al., 2022). This recognition affirms Indigenous ontologies that stress interdependence and interrelation between human and nonhuman forces, including land, water, animals, plants, and sky (Kelly et al., 2023). When understood this way, humans are in kinship with the nonhuman, not viewed as separate or separable from the relations with land and other life (Simpson, 2017). An Indigenous relational web draws our attention to how humans and nonhumans thrive via multiplicities of embodied interdependencies and remain embedded in past, present and future geographies, including by being spiritually connected to ancestors and future generations, both human and nonhuman (Coulthard & Simpson, 2016; Simpson, 2017). This view of subjectivity as entangled and co-extensive insists we acknowledge the role of socio-material forces in co-producing the human “assemblage.” Through a processual-relational framing, intersectionality keeps the uneven distribution of life and vitality legible, an important move in contexts where recognition of difference is essential to redress injustices. Difference emerges in moments where socio-material infrastructures become visible and fail to contain the connections and separations they set out to control. In this way, as we argue below, intersectionality emerges as an infrastructural inversion–one that operates and disappears into the background as it carries out the socio-material dimensions of classifications systems designed to illuminate difference.

Intersectionality and/as Infrastructure

Genealogies of infrastructure mirror that of intersectionality in how both concepts have recently seen increased scholarly attention for the work they do in illuminating inequities in the distribution of resources (infrastructures) and rights (intersectionalities) across diverse populations and in signaling the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of a collective (Appel et al., 2018). To understand how intersectional approaches such as a recruitment matrix might operate as infrastructures in research, it is necessary to attend to the conceptual underpinnings of infrastructures. Within the field, scholars theorize infrastructures as substrates (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) composed of dense material-relational networks that “facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space” (Larkin, 2013, p. 328). Infrastructure scholars Star and Ruhleder (1996) offer that rather than asking “what,” the better question to ask is “when is an infrastructure?,” a shift that recognizes how infrastructures emerge in situ, “for people in practice, connected to activities and structures” (p. 112). Encompassing everything from roadways and digital highways to human and other organic/inorganic forces (e.g., plants, waterways, rocks, technology, etc.), infrastructures comprise all “matter that enable the movement of other matter” (Larkin, 2013, p. 329). Abdou Maliq Simone (2021) approaches “people as infrastructure” to surface how human relations offer vital support systems for collective wellbeing, especially where states provision different populations differently–inadequately, unevenly, or inequitably (p. 407). This suggests that while they are conventionally understood as the stuff of mechanics and logistics, infrastructures operate as a key technology of power in democratic societies. Infrastructures permit modern states “to separate politics from nature, the technical from the political, and the human from the nonhuman” (Appel et al., 2018, p. 4) thus depoliticizing inherently political: decisions about the provisioning or curtailing of life-sustaining resources to various constituencies. Juxtaposing the material life of infrastructures with political narratives told about them can reveal how states wield infrastructures as a terrain of power, “not only to demonstrate development, progress, and modernity, giving these categories their aesthetics, form, and substance” but also “to differentiate populations and subject some to premature death” (Appel et al., 2018, p. 5). For post-humanist Hetherington (2018), beyond orienting to people as infrastructure, the infrastructural turn follows a wider anti-anthropocentric turn in the sciences—away from the false promises of the Anthropocene and toward a recognition of nature as the first infrastructure and with this, of the urgency of forming more responsible relations with humans and living environments such as those found in subaltern and Indigenous systems of thought.

This exploration invites considerations of how we might decolonialize infrastructures, for just as Indigenous and critical race scholars have worked to decolonize intersectionality conceptually, so too have they advanced decolonial theories of infrastructures. From railways in the 19th century to oil pipelines in the 21st, settler colonialism has required massive infrastructural investments to secure its future through what Tlingit scholar Spice (2018) calls “infrastructural invasion”—the ongoing infrastructural onslaught by settler states, capital, and other hegemonies to destroy Indigenous lands and lifeways and remake the socio-material world to serve settler interests (p. 40). Our settler economic system functions as a “Wiindigo economy” according to LaDuke & Cowen (2020), who implicate white supremacist masculinist systems in manufacturing the current environmental polycrisis that threaten planetary collapse. They invoke Wiindigo, the “cannibal monster of Anishinaabe legend” to symbolize the hungry or greedy element of the human condition—that unchecked human impulse to indulge in our desires until we lose self-control and act without care for life or consideration for balance (LaDuke & Cowen, 2020, p. 244). Onto the story of Windiigo they layer another Anishinaabe teaching, one which suggests that riding Wiindigo’s destructive wave comprises only one way through catastrophe it leaves in its wake; we can continue traversing treacherous waters in polluting vessels or take less well traveled waterways, navigating more carefully in non-harming craft. Orienting to these diverging paths as distinct infrastructures, LaDuke and Cowen (2020) argue that while settler infrastructures have made the “ecologies of the many into systems [that] serve the few,” people also repurpose infrastructures for decolonial ends, just as “a pipe can carry fresh water as well as toxic sludge” (p. 245). Here planetary surviving/thriving depends on centering “alimentary infrastructures,” those that give life in their design, resourcing, and effects. We find clues to alimentary infrastructures in the living repository of Indigenous stories that teach people “how to (re)make their relationships and responsibilities to one another, to nonhumans, to the sky, and to the earth” (Joanne Barker cited in LaDuke & Cowen, 2020, p. 245). Rooted in and routed through ecologies of the many, both human and nonhuman, Indigenous stories can help us generate and traverse more sustainable pathways. Settler infrastructure comprises Wiindigo’s spine but also carries “essential architecture of transition to a decolonized future” (LaDuke & Cowen, 2020, p. 246), where socio-ecological transformation requires and relies on movement, which in turn entails establishing right relations with humans and more-than-humans working as life-sustaining infrastructures.

As with intersectionality, classification emerges as central to infrastructures. According to infrastructure researchers Bowker and Star (1999), contemporary systems of classification have their roots in the 19th century, when an explosion of classification and standardization by corporate, government, educational, and medical institutions occurred in service of colonial capitalism’s modernist drive to order and master the world. As people classified, measured, and standardized everything from farm animals to human beings, diseases, and medicines, they created and mobilized categorization schemas across sectors, which “became silently embodied in the built environment and in notions of good practice” (Bowker & Star, 1999, p. 17). An inescapable part of contemporary socio-material life, categorization and standardization now happen through both official and unofficial channels (i.e., commercial and bureaucratic forms as well as the tacit everyday classifications we make as we move through the world). And, although they often fade into the background as taken-for-granted ways of segmenting the world, classification becomes visible when it breaks down or faces contestation. Here Bowker and Star (1999) highlight the material force of categorization itself, showing how every decision made in constructing a classificatory system carries ethical and political weight, advantaging or disadvantaging differently-positioned actors by “valoris[ing] some point of view and silenc[ing] another” (p. 5).

Working with Bowker and Star’s (1999) formulation of classification systems as “boundary objects”—or “objects for cooperation across social worlds” that engage multiple communities of practice and travel across borders to “maintain some sort of constant identity” (p. 16)—we might recast intersectionality as a boundary object supremely interested in the operations of categories and reconsider how its justice-desiring impulses might be redirected to interrogate the effects of classification itself. Understood thusly, the analytic becomes a tool that researchers can use to make the politics and ethics underpinning classification systems both visible and analyzable. Intersectionality’s plasticity and flexibility thus allows us to peer into containers of identity using the heuristic’s desire for justice to interrogate the dynamics of power and difference in a given research field. At the same time, its status as a boundary object opens space for researchers to use the analytic to maintain semblances of recognizable identities or experiential-political affinities, ultimately generating analyses of containers as definite and ambiguous, concrete and abstract, firm and overflowing.

With intersectionality, Crenshaw offers a literal, material infrastructure—intersecting roadways—as a metaphor for understanding how the reproduction or disruption of power and oppression occurs under democratic rule through uneven distribution or redistribution of rights (and resources) across diverse collectivities. If we accept infrastructural studies’ critical insight that democratic governments wield power through infrastructures including classification systems that unevenly distribute resources, rights, and values across different groups, then it follows that an intersectional approach can help to make this unequal distribution evident. Bowker (1995) argues that by methodologically “inverting” or drawing attention to infrastructures, we can expose how they are created and maintained by particular social forces, ideologies, and desires for the future. Here we orient to intersectionality itself as an inversion foregrounding backstage elements of legal theory since intersectionality’s interrogation of the infrastructure of categorization helps us to expose the socio-material dimensions and consequences of those same classification systems in anti-discrimination law/policy/praxis. As Penny Harvey and colleagues (2016) note, “bringing the infrastructural “ground” up front. . .facilitate[s] understanding of how complex chains of material relations reconfigure bodies, societies, and also knowledge and discourse in ways often unnoticed” (p. 3). We might think about intersectionality itself as an inversion insofar as it inverts anti-discrimination law and policy. Conceptually, intersectionality draws our attention to the limits of liberal legal theory and its derivatives in policy and practice by revealing how the anti-discrimination law and policy only ever address discrimination along a single axis, thus missing ways that forces of oppression entangle to shape life at different intersections. This opens individuals and populations to hegemonic calculations about life and death, where power operates to help strengthen or undermine, capacitate or debilitate life. Rendering work or life visible might render it surveyable but also renders these oppressive dynamics as refutable and resistible.

In identifying and seeking to intervene in overlapping inequities at sites of intersecting differences (human, more-than-human), we might consider intersectional research as generative of a justice-desiring planting scheme for redistributing the socio-material resources—or infrastructures—that govern the politics of life and death. An entangled approach follows Black, Indigenous, and racialized women’s insistence that intersectionality research move with the most impacted while exposing the malleability of intersectionality—a permeable infrastructure that works with theoretical/methodological developments in intersectionality studies and activist movements to do justice to and with the concept in/by thinking and materializing entangled difference differently. As such, we lay bare our attempts to engage with intersectional sampling criteria and the possibilities and tensions encountered, as we do below in a return to the 2020 research that opened this article, Artistry Under the Table.

Recruitment Matrices as Wild Containers

As noted above, the Re•Vision center generates/adapts recruitment matrixes as a way of privileging the inclusion of multiply minoritized people through gathering their demographic information, typically using an online survey. Before describing the application of these as research tools, a few caveats are in order. First, we have come to see matrixes as organizational tools for welcoming differences rather than analytic devices for theory-building from categories. The matrix gives us a way of attending to difference, but it cannot replace well considered community-facing recruitment strategies: for these we work with community-based artists and co-researchers to design materials that speak directly to the needs/interests of communities under question. Second, many toolkits, guides, and check-lists now exist to teach researchers how to work with intersectionality, offering technical support for its operationalization. While valuable as teaching tools, these share a few notable problems: (a) most give guidance on adopting intersectionality in relatively simplistic and formulaic ways that not only separate the analytic from its theoretical-activist roots but fail to remain alive its theoretical/methodological travels; and (b) many stress using the analytic to document the reproduction of social inequities, eliding research into change processes that disrupt oppression. Put differently, the separation of theory from practice inherent in “how to” methods manuals cannot solve the problem of how to do intersectional research because they cannot give researchers the theoretical resources required to think through how they might put the concept into practice in a dynamic world. For these reasons, we orient to matrixes less as technologies per se than as portals that invite deeper analyses of intersectionality’s mobilizations in research infrastructures.

Artistry Under the Table used a recruitment matrix to engage multiple people in our respective research spaces. Similar to purposive sampling in qualitative research, sometimes referred to as criterion based or judgment sampling, this form of sampling refers to the strategic selection of participants whose particular features or characteristics are necessary to address the aims of the study. While researchers sometimes acknowledge using these for “hard to reach” or “hidden” populations, Vicky Bungay and colleagues (2016) argue that few qualitative studies include sufficient detail about sampling criteria or rationale. When we design matrices to illuminate aspects of being at sites of multiple nondominant differences, we aim to accountably “call in” people at multiple intersections such that their participation is not a matter of impression. Matrices act as imperfect, unpredictable infrastructures—as wild containers to transport our work beyond colonialism’s categorical logics to advance decolonized understandings of intersectionality as inter and intra-sectional becomings. Like Weinberger’s “Wild Cage,” the matrix comprises an encasement of life that may or may not lead to new, unexpected growth of difference. However, by offering space to give descriptive and metaphorical language to nondominant differences without appealing to identity logics (whether biomedical, cultural, or scientific-instrumentalist), matrices can help us to decolonize intersectionality conceptually by moving beyond, around, and outside the categories that colonial thought systems hierarchically impose to vertically order life; and they do this materially—or viscerally, carnally, affectively—by extending care in ways that deprivilege the (normative) human and the normative categories into which hegemonic orders seek to contain us/them. Yet, we wonder: can matrices, which often do produce painful interpretations of identity markers, also create space in knowledge production for those who have historically been excluded from these processes?

In reflecting on our 2020 recruitment matrix, we notice that the matrix both enforces identitarian categories and creates space for other, entangled differences to emerge. For example, it quickly became clear that the matrix could not capture the category of “intellectual disability” very well. When we consider “intellectual disability” as more robust than a clear-cut identity label, we must acknowledge that access to life is felt unevenly across embodied difference that involves intellectual disability (Carlson, 2010); and here, intersectionality as infrastructure is a useful metaphor for understanding entanglements of intra-sectional becomings. Put differently, intellectual disability comprises a complex, entangled category overflowing with difference and motility. Yet, this category remains a highly stigmatized one that many people dis-identify with due to essentialist, colonial-ableist knowledge systems that elevate one mode of embodiment (abled) over all others and that value cognitive over all other ways of knowing (K. A. Bailey et al., 2024; Bessey et al., 2023; Chen, 2023; Jackson, 2021; Strings, 2019). The overflow of this category was demonstrated by an actor with a long history in intellectual disability performance groups who, when asked if there was anything else they wanted us to know, said, “I’m not fully sure how I would answer that question.” By responding in unexpected ways, they and other participants split from deficiency-based labels to re-signify difference and remake culture in difference-affirmative ways. Because the matrix makes room for both ways of understanding “intellectual disability” and more, it simultaneously engages with and challenges categorical logics; this dual move feels supremely permissible in a sociocultural context where persons assigned this label must both adhere to its stagnant stigmatizing meaning and transcend its limits (M. Bailey & Mobley, 2019; Campbell, 2008; Gibson, et al., 2025; Lugones, 1994; Puar, 2012).

In allowing for many sides of difference to emerge and overflow in a matrix, we aimed to include single-axis approaches that render illegible those who live intersecting differences. In so doing, we watched the matrix serve as a limited—and liminal—container that eventually overflowed with difference through and beyond “intellectual disability,” as potential participants’ ways of understanding and describing themselves could not be encased in this recruitment tool. Bearing witness to the overflow of identities that could not be contained, the matrix became a place of entanglement that overturned intersectionality, creating an infrastructural inversion that works to overcome intersectionality’s perceived methodological limitations due to its reliance on western identitarian logics (i.e., which stress purity, authenticity, and singularity of identity, and cast non-normativity as less than) (Fotopoulou, 2012; Rice et al., 2019) by placing greater emphasis on social forces as containers shaping, but not necessarily determining, individual identities/positionalities.

Intersectionality as Difference-Affirming Infrastructure

Intersectionality travels. As a concept, a theory, a methodology, a heuristic, and even as just an “empty signifier” or “buzzword” (Davis, 2008), intersectionality has crossed geopolitical and disciplinary borders that include and span far beyond any one research project’s use of a recruitment matrix. We acknowledge that expanding beyond its disciplinary roots in Black feminism, women and gender studies, and critical race and legal studies, intersectionality has spanned the disciplines (Abrams et al., 2020; P. H. Collins & Bilge, 2020). Intersectionality has sat in countless syllabi and classrooms; skipped across public policy texts and legislation (Garcia & Zajicek, 2022; Hankivsky & Jordan-Zachery, 2019); been paraded in front of research ethics boards; dipped through qualitative research projects (Windsong, 2018); begun to wobble through quantitative research efforts (Else-Quest & Hyde, 2016); and more recently has been streamed across social media discussions and rallied around at social justice oriented protests (Brown et al., 2017).

Working within a research ecology that names intersectionality as a criterion for funding means that it is difficult for scholars to proceed with research void of the analytic. Yet, there remain significant tensions over intersectionality’s origins, its contemporary uptake, and how it ought to be used. Questions about who can claim intersectionality exacerbates these tensions. Black women’s ownership of intersectionality is uncontestable; yet, troublingly, researchers have stretched and challenged intersectionality’s uses through their uptake of the analytic in ways that ignore/sidestep the ethico-epistemological concerns/challenges raised by Black feminist thought (Rice et al., 2019). Nevertheless, the research ecology urges intersectionality’s adoption as something (a tool, a theory, a method, etc.) that is not only up for grabs but is a required ingredient in institutional research that pairs, and at time substitutes, intersectionality as a buzzword for larger EDI agendas (Davis, 2008). When it operates as a buzzword that simply extends equity agendas without addressing equity issues, intersectionality risks being treated as a passe idea, dismissed as a “meme gone viral” (Hancock, 2016, p. 17). Importantly, institutions often invoke intersectionality as a cover in situations where they expect the heuristic to do the kind of equity work that the system has failed to do, such as ending systemic exclusion or fixing the institution’s “diversity problems” (Ahmed, 2012). Audre Lorde’s (2018) prescient warning to beware of “the terror of not producing” and “the urge to justify your decision,” reminds us to pay close attention to institutional conditions under which we theorize and practice intersectionality.

We argue for the enduring significance of intersectionality by highlighting infrastructures that recognize and embrace their own processual nature. And in doing so, we acknowledge that such infrastructures often fall short of encapsulating the complexity, multiplicity, and inherent changeability of both human and more-than-human worlds. In other words, any classification system inevitably fails to fully represent the rich diversity of experiences and differences. Ultimately, categories and classification systems are attempts to impose human order on the untamable, yet they will always struggle to capture the entirety of interconnectedness and entanglement that exists. Using the “master’s tools,” we emphasize that this understanding serves as a starting point for recognizing difference, rather than merely organizing people into categories for governance. To the extent that infrastructures enable us to unveil difference, they become valuable and useful. These infrastructures create new publics by bringing to light previously unacknowledged differences and experiences, helping to shape these publics and fostering groups that will assert their demands.

The methodological insights that emerge in bringing critical infrastructure and intersectionality studies together with research that centers nondominant differences, as we have done here, leads us to conclude that applying recruitment matrices can embolden difference to assert itself politically and become intelligible to power, thereby expanding the scope of intersectionality’s reach in justice-committed ways elaborated above. Yet through this transdisciplinary coming together of intersectionality and infrastructures via Artistry Under the Table, we have also learned that the capacity for difference to emerge and exceed its containment relies on the broader research ecology’s understandings of and orientations to difference, and the adeptness or flexibility of researchers and research apparatuses in moving with the emergent and unknown. In our collective experiences of advancing intersectional research, cultivating a difference-attuned approach to methodology has strongly depended on (at least) three process-related considerations/actions—an embrace of failure, a careful probing of our theoretical assumptions and frames, and an orientation to intersectionality as infrastructure. We briefly unpack these by way of a conclusion.

Our first consideration entails committing to failure as part of the intersectionality-infused research process. Our own research matrix, for example, demonstrates how identitarian categories fail to contain difference and how researchers can lean into “failures” in an effort to invite the unmapped and not-yet-known. In Artistry Under the Table, this occurred through survey tools and face-to-face encounters wherein we asked open-ended questions that gave people space to self-define in their chosen ways and through our decisions to deploy analytic approaches that took seriously their understandings. This connects to a second methodological consideration. We have found that giving difference space to breathe often pivots on careful consideration of the axioms and analytic frames grounding a study. In this research, the processual-relational framing we adopted allowed us not only to think with intricate intersectional arguments put forth by Black and women of color scholars but further, to expand the frame using decolonial approaches that invited human and more-than-human considerations. As intersectionality’s lively genealogy proceeds and opens to decolonial feminist scholarship that considers human relationalities with “all of creation” (Simpson, 2017), so do questions of how to do intersectional research change. This reveals cracks in our social infrastructures, as reflected in institutional research expectations narrowly focused on diversity agendas premised on pre-prescribed categories of human-centric difference. Weinberger’s “Wild Cage” offers a new metaphor for engagement and overflow of difference that includes and transcends known categories and engages carefully, seriously, with relationalities with the more-than-human world.

Our third and final consideration for attuning to difference so that it may politically presence itself and become intelligible to power traces genealogies of infrastructures—or rethinks intersectionality as infrastructure—and through this, illuminates identitarian classifications and recognizes inverses that, by design, comprise the social forces that routinely work to erase non-dominant differences. Keeping Weinberger’s “Wild Cage” in mind, we acknowledge that intersectionality will never fully capture the complex reality of lived experience, or fully account for the challenges that reality’s dynamism presents to what we think we know. In this sense, we liken the infrastructure of intersectionality to a garden. Reflecting on Bean’s overflowing garden, we find hope and promise in how difference continually transgresses the rigid lines that seek to contain it, eventually spilling over the rusting, warping, degrading infrastructures that eugenic colonial capitalist forces leave in their wake to embolden new configurations of selves and socialities, of nature cultures, to take root. And, as Natasha Meyers (2019) writes in her reflections on “Wild Cage” as type of garden emerging amid urban infrastructures, “we do not yet know what a garden is or what a garden can do” (p. 116).

Conclusion

In this article, we have focused on one instance wherein intersectionality’s promise of progress has broken to reveal its infrastructural characteristics that allow for flaw, breakage, and a vast overflow of identities. In introducing intersectionality as infrastructure, we point to intersectionality’s unboundedness; it is a site of possibility that points to tensions. As Nikhil Appel and colleagues (2018) note, tensions “between aspiration and failure, provision and abjection, and technical progress and its underbelly” make infrastructure “a productive location to examine the constitution, maintenance, and reproduction of political and economic life” (p. 3). In this sense, intersectionality allows for the circulation of people, ideas and things, that, like infrastructures, permit modern governments “to separate politics from nature, the technical from the political, and the human from the nonhuman” and thus to depoliticize the inherently political—the provisioning of infrastructure—as a technical problem to be solved. Much like Weinberger’s “Wild Cage,” intersectionality proves to be an imperfect but intentional encasement, or garden, that difference can break through.