Intersectionality and Historically Informed Dependency Studies

The International Workshop on Dependency Theory and Intersectionality, which took place on October 24th and 25th, 2024, was a first-of-its-kind event at the BCDSS. The workshop was last year’s Research Area E (Gender and Intersectionality) thematic year concluding event. It was organized by Eva Lehner, Sara Eriksson, and myself.

View of the workshop’s opening session on Thursday, October 24^th. Unless otherwise noted, all photos in this post are by the author.

For this workshop, we wanted to do something new. Rather than bringing together dozens of scholars from around the world to present brief specialized papers (a laudable approach, of course), we invited four highly regarded experts in their respective fields to offer ‘masterclass-style’ presentations. Extensive hour-and-a-half-long discussions then followed these presentations. Though the lengthy conversations may have felt a bit like doctoral disputations for the scholars who sat in the ‘hot seat,’ they provided participants with an exciting opportunity to discuss both the talks and pre-circulated readings in detail. The assigned texts, most of which were selected from the main speaker’s bibliographies, deepened participants’ engagement with the theoretical perspectives outlined by the speakers.

Sara Eriksson offers opening remarks during the workshop’s opening session.

Our invited experts came from four disciplines. From anthropology and archeology, we welcomed Laurie A. Wilkie of UC Berkeley; from theology, we invited Keri L. Day of Princeton Seminary; from sociology, we invited Zine Magubane of Boston College; and for historiography, our discussion was guided by Karen Graubart from the University of Notre Dame.

In accordance with the goals of the workshop, each talk challenged us to consider both how dependency studies might benefit from a greater emphasis on intersectionality and how scholars who employ intersectionality might profit from historically informed dependency studies.

After each of the presentations, a senior scholar from or affiliated with the University of Bonn offered a response that kicked off rigorous discussions among participants. Natalie Joy, Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University (also a BCDSS Senior Fellow) and expert on Native American history as well as abolitionism, offered the response to Prof. Wilkie. Matthias Braun, Professor of Social Ethics at Bonn’s Faculty of Protestant Theology, who specializes in religious, political, and scientific ethics, offered the response to Prof. Day. Claudia Jarzebowski, BCDSS Professor for Early Modern History and Dependency Studies, whose work explores themes of trauma, violence, childhood, and gender through the lens of dependency, offered the response to Prof. Magubane. Last but certainly not least, Karoline Noack, Professor for the Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn, whose work explores categories of social dependency in the pre-and post-colonial Americas, responded to Prof. Graubart.

Social media shoutout from the BCDSS PR Team: Prof. Dr. Jarzebowski opens the discussion round of Prof. Dr. Magubane’s talk. Photo by Buğra Nuri Duman.

Along with my fellow organizers, I also want to acknowledge the significant contributions of our BCDSS colleague, Danitza L. Márquez Ramírez. She not only helped us behind the scenes but also introduced and moderated the discussion of Prof. Graubart’s work.

Danitza Márquez Ramírez moderating a discussion session on the second day of the workshop.

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We sought to create an environment in which discussions could be as free-flowing, wide-ranging, and in-depth as possible. Thus, the notion that one might summarize insights gleaned from our two days together in a single blog post is a bit far-fetched. So, my aim in the rest of this post will be to relay an unsystematized amalgam of the insights I gleaned from the talks, with the expectation that other participants may have different takeaways.

Prof. Wilkie’s talk, which exemplified the American scholarly tradition of combining the approaches of anthropology and archeology, outlined an ‘archeology of care’ in relation to her studies of historic institutional sites in the United States.

She placed archeological findings in conversation with critical analysis of the ways that eugenicist ideas shaped scientific literature and praxis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She drew upon ‘crip theory,’ Critical Disability Studies (CDS), and archeological work (thus, practicing ‘crip archeology’ in the context of, for example, plantation archeology) to show how, at the turn of the twentieth century, government-operated institutions– including those dedicated to healthcare– could function as “debilitating spaces.”

Moreover, in a section on the relationship between normative sources and archeological findings, she noted that, in many systems, “it is in the space between policy and implementation that violence enters into” the frame. In contrast to such systems, she outlined how “communities of care” often emerge amidst broader relationships of asymmetrical dependency. She also showed that, while, in common parlance, the receipt of care implies dependency, “the history of disability rights was a struggle for independence…” Additionally, contrary to the stereotype of the independent caregiver and the dependent recipient of care, caregivers were and are often also considered disabled.

Prof. Dr. Wilkie responds to questions and comments during the discussion session following her talk.

In addition to these insights, the extended discussion of Prof. Wilkie’s contribution brought to the fore the importance of oral historiography to the Cluster’s work. Indeed, even for studies of ancient history or archeology, where contemporaries of the subject under consideration might no longer be available for conversation, oral history interviews within related communities can be an excellent resource for historically informed dependency studies.

Prof. Day’s talk focused on enslaved and formerly enslaved Black women’s religious cultures. She raised questions about dependency, agency, and what she called “Spirit Power.”

She shed new light on the ethical ambiguities, negotiations, and complex practices of freedom deployed by enslaved and formerly enslaved women in the late-nineteenth-century United States. The experiences of these women often included assertions of their reproductive rights, which challenged reigning notions of Christian morality in ways that were “less absolute and more paradoxical and ambiguous.”

Prof. Dr. Day during her talk.

The discussion focused both on Prof. Day’s presentation and her recent publications, which illuminate the crucial role played by Black women in the advent of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 and beyond. In her recent monograph, Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging and related publications, Prof. Day shows how Black women shepherded emergent practices of faith, which were shaped by the crucible of enslavement in the non-statist, but nonetheless, politically charged atmosphere of Azusa.

Prof. Day’s reflection on “Spirit Power,” a concept she is continuing to refine in the wake of the discussion at the workshop, also generated passionate dialogue within the group. Academic theologians were a minority in the room. Even so, we quickly bridged perceived disciplinary divides. From my perspective, it seems clear that Prof. Day’s work offered an exhibit in the case for theological research that is not just (or primarily) a search for the deus absconditus (the hidden God) up there, but rather a reflection on experiences of the divine in the practices– the doings and sayings– of the long-silenced.

Furthermore, the role of cosmologies and cosmovisions in both constructing and overcoming dependencies was a red thread that ran throughout the group’s discussion of both Prof. Wilkie’s and Prof. Day’s talks. A key insight from our conversations pertained to the importance of acknowledging the complex ways in which ‘care webs’ and networks of asymmetrical dependency can often be intertwined. Webs of care, like ‘Spirit Power’ (or, at least, spiritual power), can be liberative, but they can also become webs that entangle and power that dominates.

Prof. Magubane’s talk focused on the legacies of slavery and offered a pointed response to “slavery and its legacies” discussions in U.S. history and memory. She placed a special emphasis on how these discussions (both past and present) have raised questions about identity without significant attention to questions of class.

This consequential insight, which I have only begun to process with the help of various BCDSS colleagues (especially Joe Biggerstaff and Eva Lehner), is one that becomes somewhat obvious once named but is nonetheless very easily missed.

Prof. Dr. Magubane during her talk.

In addition to offering reflections on the state of historiography and public memory, as a historical sociologist, Magubane also offered a critical evaluation of intersectionality theory in general. Intersectionality theory was developed in the context of the law and the representation of people from different backgrounds in the labor market. Along with other scholars in recent years, Magubane emphasized that structural inequality must be understood not only in terms of the identity categories of gender and race but also in terms of class inequalities. In this regard, she introduced us to the context in which American discourses on race, gender, and class developed, emphasizing slavery as the original sin of racial inequality and racism.

Given that I study theology and church history, it is perhaps unsurprising that Prof. Magubane’s use of various theological notions as sociological concepts is repeatedly addressed in my notes from her session. For example, paraphrasing the great twentieth-century American theological ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, during the discussion, one person suggested, “Sin is such a useful sociological concept that if it did not exist, we would have to invent it.”

Prof. Magubane also deployed other terms that can easily be described as ‘theological:’ among them, reconciliation, confession, penance, and redemption as the idea of the already and the not yet. Of course, as our discussions made clear, in sociology or other disciplines, the use of theological language can illuminate or obscure; it can concretize, but it can also abstract.

Scholars often blush at the notion that such conversations can lead to reconsiderations of the ethical or even novel questions about healthy discourse in our fields (i.e., the nature of ‘good’ theology, good anthropology, good sociology, good historiography, etc.) – a highly normative mode of thought, indeed. Nevertheless, our discussion frequently touched on concerns related to professional ethics and considerations of the “Good society,” which cannot (and, perhaps, should not) be uncritically separated from the practice of historically informed dependency studies.

Prof. Graubart’s talk, which drove a fruitful discussion of historiographic theories and methodologies, focused on the presence of Black women in Spanish colonial legal records.

Her presentation invited participants into a complex discussion of the multi-vectored dependencies and intersectional relational forms present in the Iberian Atlantic world. For example, she showed how legal formulae can reveal not only pro-forma arguments related to the lives of enslaved or formerly enslaved people but also how people of diverse (and contextually constructed) racial backgrounds and roles in society actively participated in the legal system.

Prof. Dr. Graubart during her talk.

Her contribution made clear the importance of careful grammatical and orthographic analysis of historical sources, which are essential to studies of asymmetrical dependency in the context of normative regimes. She showed how, despite their formulaic rigidity, scrutiny of legal records can reveal historiographically significant situational attestations. By analyzing these attestations, we can move beyond the perspective of the archives (which is often shaped by that of the hegemonic authority) and listen for the long-silenced voices of people who pled their cases in legal proceedings.

In addition to the methodological insights she offered, Prof. Graubart also challenged the BCDSS to think carefully about each aspect of the theoretical framework its researchers employ. During a penetrating discussion of analytical categories in relation to intersectionality theory, she made clear that we would do well to reflect more carefully on how we understand the complex web of relations between categories as descriptions of material conditions and categories as discursive heuristics. The potency of this insight becomes especially apparent when we consider the interdisciplinary context and occasional miscommunications between researchers from different fields within the cluster. Perhaps it would be reductionistic to allow either understanding of analytical categories to have the final word, but a better understanding of the intersections and divergences between the two perspectives may be a key site for further reflection within historically informed dependency studies.

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This brief reflection has only scratched the surface of what we discussed. Our conversations were simultaneously broad and deep, contextually grounded and robustly theory-reflective.

Based on the feedback received from BCDSS members in attendance, it seems clear that the model developed for this workshop commends itself to future use. Our discussions showed how fruitful it can be to place historically informed dependency studies in conversation with intersectionality theory.

Dr. Eva Lehner offering remarks during one of the sessions on Day II.

The Research Area E discussion paper, Asymmetrical Dependencies and Intersectionality, articulates an understanding of intersectionality primarily as a concept. The authors state,

“The concept of intersectionality states that social formulations do not exist in isolation but are instead linked by complex and interwoven relationships. Intersectionality is thus based on the assumption that all factors informing the identity and social position of a person are inextricably connected.

Anyone familiar with the scholarly discourse around intersectionality knows that this is just one of many ways to deploy the term/concept/theory. Aside from raising what are, to my mind, important questions about whether intersectionality really does aim to address “all factors” informing identity and social position (rather than focusing on those that result in social marginalization in a given context), others have also understood intersectionality differently on a more basic level. As the discussion paper itself notes, others have treated it primarily as an approach, a theory in itself, as research praxis or methodology, or as a tool for policy analysis in legal discourse.

As the analytical concept of asymmetrical dependency and the praxis of asymmetrical dependency research converge and continue to evolve into what some have called “historically informed dependency studies,” – which could be conceptualized as an emergent field of inquiry– scholars should continue to reflect on how the work of the BCDSS relates to other frameworks like intersectionality.

More robust dialogue between proponents of asymmetrical dependency as an analytical concept and advocates for other extant frameworks is needed as the BCDSS continues to develop its collective understanding of historically informed dependency studies.

Note on quotations: Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this blog are from contemporaneous notes that I took during the discussions. Any mistakes are my own.