PROJECT: Understanding Intersectional Agency:
Privilege, disadvantage, and feminist activists in São Paulo, Brazil
I completed my PhD in Sociology at the University of Manchester. The topic of the PhD was ‘intersectional agency’. It was examined December 2019 (Ai/no corrections).
The thesis looked specifically at agency (which I define as the ‘capacity to act or to not act’) at the intersection of disadvantage and privilege, inaction, and social in/justice. Although I sought to conceptualise ‘intersectional agency’ in the thesis, it is grounded in empirical analysis – of three cases – from fieldwork that I did in São Paulo (Brazil).
I am currently rewriting the thesis into a monograph. The working title is: Understanding Intersectional Agency: Privilege, disadvantage, and feminist activists in São Paulo, Brazil. The proposal for this book is currently under review.
Abstract thesis: Based on ‘phenomenological conversations’ with racially privileged feminist activists from São Paulo (Brazil), the project offers a detailed empirical and theoretical analysis of the interplay of social categories (gender, race, sexuality, class, species), power (both disadvantage and privilege), and agential elements (i.e. cognitive, emotive and moral elements) in the mobilisation of ‘intersectional agency’. Responding to the lack of an existing conceptual framework in intersectionality studies and in agency studies, the thesis contributes to both areas of studies an empirically grounded conceptualisation of intersectional agency as a polylithic mechanism.
FUNDING: University of Manchester Sociology PhD Studentship
MAIN OUTCOME TO DATE
Huijg, D.D. (2020). “Neuronormativity in theorising agency: An argument for a critical neurodiversity approach.” In: Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, Nick Chown & Anna Stenning (Eds), Neurodiversity studies: A new critical paradigm (pp.213-217): Routledge. [Invited chapter] [Open access version]
Huijg, D.D. (2020). Intersectional Agency: A theoretical exploration of agency at the junction of social categories and power, based on conversations with racially privileged feminist activists from São Paulo, Brazil, University of Manchester. [PhD thesis; result viva: no corrections/Ai]
Huijg, D.D. (2012). “Tension in Intersectional Agency. A theoretical discussion of the interior conflict of white, feminist activists’ intersectional location.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, Vol.13, No.2: 3-18. Invited contribution to a special issue on young feminism in Brazil. [Publication from the 2010 Essay Prize of the FSA]
Huijg, D.D. (2011). “‘Eu não preciso falar que eu sou branca, cara, eu sou Latina!’ Ou a complexidade da identificação racial na ideologia de ativistas jovens (não-)brancas”, [‘I do not have to say that I’m white, man, I am Latina!’ Or the complexity of the racial identification in the ideology of (non)white, young, female activists]. Cadernos PAGU, Vol.36, No.jan-junho: 77-116. [Invited article for a special issue on young feminism in Brazil]
2010 Essay Prize, Feminist (Women) Studies Association UK & Ireland (FSA).