Ibtihal Ramadan discusses why intersectionality matters in youth research and employment transitions, particularly for young people in East Birmingham and North Solihull (EBNS).
Introduction
The population of East Birmingham and North Solihull (EBNS) is young, ethnically diverse, and relatively poor. With a higher-than-average likelihood of being NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), there have been persistent concerns about how this population engages with the wider city economy. Concerns have further been raised about whether geographically concentrated ethnic communities can access employment opportunities across the city. These concerns link economic issues with the places in EBNS and the identities of the people who live there and addressing them requires us to avoid reductionist views of young people’s identities and agency. Instead, analysis should focus on the interactions of young people’s identities – that are in themselves complex – with structural aspects of youth, including the demand for young people’s labour in local economies, and the systems and infrastructure afforded by the places they live including education and skills provision, health and transport services.
With this complexity in mind, we have integrated intersectionality both in the research design and as an analytical tool in the qualitative aspect of this research. Originating from Kimberle Crenshaw’s seminal work that examined U.S. legal cases where Black women’s experiences of discrimination were overlooked because courts treated race and gender separately, she argues that a single-axis approach erases the realities of individuals with intersecting identities. Intersectionality foregrounds how multiple, intertwining power hierarchies- gender, race, religion and other social identities- interact to structure individuals’ social positioning, lived experiences, and life chances. Youth identities, mediated by systemic, social, cultural, and spatial positioning play a critical role in shaping their educational experiences, career trajectories and life opportunities (Hopkins, 2010). The following sections define intersectionality, outline its significance to youth studies, and propose it as a framework to capture the interaction of place, identities and agency in EBNS youth experiences and narratives to good employment.
What is Intersectionality?
Intersectionality is a critical framework for understanding how the interaction of intersecting social identities – race, faith, gender, class, sexuality, and other markers – unfolds within a broader matrix of interconnected power structures, including policies, and social institutions, producing unique experiences of oppression and or privilege, advantage and disadvantage. Intersectionality involves the recognition that the lived realities of individuals are shaped by embedded hierarchies operating across social institutions, resulting in patterns of exclusion and discrimination that affect access to, and progression in, education and employment. Emphasising the complexity and fluidity of lived experiences, Phoenix underscores the relational nature of intersectionality and warns against flattening complex identities into static or additive categories that impede a critical understanding of difference. For instance, this can be an issue in some quantitative work that categorise populations by gender +ethnicity + economic status, without exploring how these identity dimensions interconnect in lived experience.
Crenshaw’s expansion of her original intersectionality framework to differentiate between ‘structural’ and ‘representational’ intersectionality is especially relevant to this study. Structural intersectionality focuses on how social institutions—such as education systems, labour markets—create compounded disadvantage for individuals with intersecting marginalised identities, reproducing exclusion. For instance, NEET youth in EBNS from racialised, working-class, disabled, mental health-affected, or care-experienced backgrounds face compounded barriers to employment, particularly ‘good employment’. Representational intersectionality reveals how cultural narratives, media, and public discourse—including employers’ views and recruitment schemes—shape societal expectations which in turn affect young people’s self-perceptions, aspirations, and expectations. Representational Intersectionality examines how such representations obscure structural barriers while justifying exclusions through deficit-based narratives. The integration of these analytical frameworks ensures that youth voices are central to the analysis, reframing employment transition as social justice issues and ensuring that youth lived realities matter on their own terms, as discussed in the research design section.
By combining these frameworks, analysis moves beyond surface-level metrics to capture the complexity of lived realities: the daily negotiations of commuting costs, digital access, caring responsibilities, and stigma. This approach ensures that youth voices are not only included but centred, highlighting what matters to them—such as stability, dignity, and meaningful progression—rather than imposing externally defined success measures. For example, participatory methods can uncover how guidance practices in schools, eligibility for apprenticeships, and interactions with welfare systems intersect with cultural assumptions, creating barriers that are invisible in single-axis analyses.
Why youth studies need intersectionality?
Intersectionality helps us explore the complex nature of youth disadvantage as it is lived, challenging approaches that attempt to separate out or compare the effects of age, gender, race, and disability. Such approaches decontextualise identities, downplay young people’s own understanding of themselves and their experiences and fail to recognise the complex, fluid, and context-related nature of youth identities . The result can be an approach that attributes disadvantage to the category of identity, for example to age, gender or ethnicity, while overlooking the way space, place, institutions, families, communities, and policies are intersecting with the young person’s identity and influencing life trajectories. (
This approach is consistent with research in the field of youth studies, notably MacDonald and colleagues’ work , see also Shildrick et al’s work including publications from the Teesside Studies, which offers compelling critiques of representations of NEET young people in terms of ‘intergenerational worklessness cultures’ and entrenched anti-work attitudes. Their research challenges explanations of persistent intergenerational poverty as the result of the culture of families and communities experiencing poverty, redirecting attention to structural forces shaping socio-economic marginalisation.
Similarly, recent research findings challenge the kinds of deficit-based assumptions about young people that can be found embedded in school and LA identification systems of young people ‘at risk’ of becoming NEET as being disengaged or indifferent. Using a longitudinal ethnographic study of 81 young people aged 14–16 flagged as ‘at-risk’ of becoming NEET, the researchers of this study examine how they orient toward education and invest in key stakes such as GCSE exams. Identified through Department for Education guidance and Risk of NEET Indicators (RONI)-type criteria (low attendance, predicted low grades, Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND), behavioural issues), findings show that youth disengagement from school is not the result of indifference but a response to systemic constraints, as most value education and aspire to positive futures. However, structural and emotional barriers—exclusion histories, unstable home lives, unmet needs—limit their ability to meet school expectations. While the study does not apply intersectionality, its insights point to the value of an intersectional lens for understanding how transitions to employment for diverse young people in EBNS are shaped by fluid, relational, complex identities interacting with multi-layered systems of exclusion – including education and labour market. It ultimately informs the development of more inclusive pathways and policy interventions that speak to youth realities, ensuring that intersectional structural inequalities are not misinterpreted as individual failings
The Operationalisation Gap and empirical examples:
Intersectionality’s application in youth studies faces significant challenges, particularly through ‘ornamental intersectionality’ mentioned in titles or abstracts but not applied methodologically. Researchers often reduce intersectionality to a checklist of discrete identity categories, ignoring the complex, relational analysis of intertwined power structures. For instance, ornamental approaches might study a care-experienced, Muslim, working-class young woman by asking direct questions like “How does being Muslim affect your experience in job centres?”—treating her identities as fixed and homogenous, invoking mainstream stereotypes about faith and modesty, and essentialising what intersectionality aims to challenge. This overlooks how youth may not consciously identify which identity dimension most impacts others’ perceptions and ignores individual agency such as negotiating dress styles across different spaces or seeking culturally sensitive support. In contrast, a holistic intersectional lens allows her to share her story while attending to place, emotions, and relationships, probing feelings about specific moments and respecting her agency by opening space for reflection on decisions and others’ perceptions. This approach allows her to define who she is and how she negotiates or resists identity aspects across contexts, situating identity within emotions, space, and power, and capturing her experience’s complexity through the dynamic interplay of structure, place, relationships, agency, and negotiated identity.
Towards more rigorous intersectional youth research: insights from qualitative research design
Intersectionality has informed our qualitative research design in several ways. To begin with, our approach to sampling aims to take account of the complex and intersecting inequalities affecting young people living in EBNS including ethnicity, migration background, SEND, race, religion, and class. Building on this, our methods are designed to give voice to these young people and capture how they articulate the complexity of their identities and their relationship to being young and living in EBNS through biographic interviewing. During the interviews we will use timeline activities to allow participants to map their past, present, and anticipated futures, highlighting significant life events and relationships. This approach situates individual biographies in the context of structural features of being young and the systems and infrastructure of their local place, capturing how these shape their transitions. For example, a timeline might reveal how a young migrant woman’s educational trajectory was disrupted by caring responsibilities, which intersected with cultural expectations and labour market discrimination, producing insight into compounded disadvantage that is difficult to convey in standardized surveys.
Furthermore, intersectionality is part of our analysis of data, helping us take account of complex lived realities expressed in young people’s terms, shaped by structural and systemic dynamics that shape their biographies. Moving beyond this, we aim to use personas to communicate our research findings on diverse young people’s transitions to employment in EBNS, as this approach maintains the holistic complexity of young people’s lives while making findings accessible. Each persona will situate a young person within intersecting structures of power, through showing how race, class, gender, care experience, and other dimensions interlock to shape lived realities through their journeys across education, service providers, training, job centres, and job markets. Persona representations underscore how intersecting identities are activated, negotiated, or resisted differently in each institutional space, concurrently grounded in East Birmingham’s social geography and biographical trajectories. Personas thus capture the diversity within intersectional experiences and patterns across diverse positionalities, offering actionable insights into the systemic barriers young people face and guide tailoring precise policy interventions.
Further, intersectional analysis demands that as researchers we are reflexive, considering how our own social positioning has influenced our interpretation and presentation of the data. We also aim to provide briefings in ways that are useful and accessible to various organisations working with young people through personas as composite constructions drawing on patterns identified in young people accounts of transition into employment, offering research findings in a form that present actionable insights for practice.
Conclusion
Intersectionality is a sophisticated idea but is an important means of producing meaningful and accessible accounts both complex journeys that young people living in EBNS make into employment, and of the different experiences and challenges of differently situated young people. Ultimately, intersectionality challenges us to reimagine youth research and policy interventions—not as mechanisms for responsibilising individuals, but as a means of creating genuinely inclusive pathways to good employment.
This blog was written by Ibtihal Ramadan, School of Education, University of Birmingham.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.