In this post Marcelo Afonso Ribeiro who is a professor and researcher at University of São Paulo, Brazil argues for the importance of an awareness of intersectionality for careers workers. Intersectionality is a concept that has been growing in influence and Marcelo presents some theoretical points which have a lot of implications for careers practice.

Intersectionality can be understood as a transdisciplinary theory aimed at capturing the complexity of identities and social inequalities through a complex and integrated approach based on the interconnectedness of gender/sexuality, social class, and race/ethnicity:

“Intersectionality makes plain that gender, race, class, and sexuality simultaneously affect the perceptions, experiences, and opportunities of everyone living in a society stratified along these dimensions” (Cole, 2009).

Intersectionality can be viewed as a key factor for career guidance since “the awareness of social place, gender and skin color fosters a person’s ability to place himself/herself as a subject of his/her educational and professional future” (Silva, Paiva & Ribeiro, 2016).   

Many authors have drawn attention to the importance of intersectionality in career guidance, but most of them do not address this fully in career guidance practice. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are general principles that reinforce the relevance of intersectionality for career guidance, via their advocacy of gender equality, decent work, and reduced inequalities.

I go onto briefly present key principles, attitudes, and some technical concepts for a career guidance grounded in the intersectionality of gender/sexuality, class, and race/ethnicity.

Two key principles: intercultural dialogue and hybridism

Intercultural dialogue is defined by the idea that knowledge needs to be always co-constructed by the relationship of all involved in a given context, e.g., practitioner and client in a career guidance interaction without the one carrying more weight than the other, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) proposed. Thus, intercultural dialogue “can be offered by someone from a different cultural group than those who it is done with” (Silva, Paiva & Ribeiro, 2016). Remembering Paulo Freire (1970), interaction must be “forged with others, not for others”. And Freire states that the world is built on knowledge reproduction and on ways of being and acting. However, new links between existing ways of being and acting may arise and create hybrids as alternative, but socially recognized, ways of being and existing in the world (Bruno Latour, 1993).

It follows that career guidance must be built through intercultural dialogue aiming at the generation of hybrids that would enable the co-construction of new social and cultural places and positions for people living based on disadvantages of class, gender/sexuality, and race/ethnicity. This process is always made by an ongoing process of negotiation between people and contexts.

Core attitudes

We consider situated knowledge, an intersectional perspective and way of acting, and interventions that extend to the social contexts, as well as a logic of co-construction via diatopical hermeneutics as the core attitudes for a career guidance grounded in the intersectionality of gender/sexuality, class, and race/ethnicity. According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), the diatopical hermeneutics attitude is based on the idea that all knowledge involved in a specific relationship should be considered valid with no hierarchical link between them (e.g., practitioner and client in a career guidance intervention).

Technical framework

A Co-construction process, the enhancement of critical consciousness, diatopical hermeneutics, discursive validation, and communitarian strategies are the main strategies for sustaining intersectional attitudes in practice.

Thus, embedding intersectionality in career guidance is a way to contribute to the enhancement of studies in career guidance and social justice as it highlights the importance of making people aware of the social and cultural position they occupy regarding social class, race/ethnicity, and gender/sexuality, and to make sense of the psychosocial disadvantages resulting from this intersectionality to co-construct strategies to transcend this position. Moreover, a career guidance grounded in  intersectionality may help people validate their working position as having great social recognition, and assist them to move beyond a sociocultural devalued position. It also offers the potential for promoting decent working trajectories and achievements, acting in support of the aforementioned UN SDGs.