Intersectional Approaches to Building Health Equity In Multicultural Societies: Current Challenges and Opportunities for Research and Policy

Health inequity - and its social, economic, and wellbeing consequences - is a globally recognised social and public health challenge of our time. For people from racially and culturally diverse backgrounds (including migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and Indigenous communities) disparate access to quality health services and information is a long-established problem. These communities face substantial healthcare barriers, including a lack of culturally competent care, provider bias, and inaccessible service delivery models. The consequences extend far beyond individual-level wellbeing, with substantial structural-level exclusion and intergenerational harm observed on a global scale. These harms are compounded for multicultural communities who are further marginalised due to identity factors including (but not limited to) gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion, and socio-economic status.

Recent global crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, have motivated calls for improved efforts to understand and respond to health-related disparities while accounting for overlapping experiences of marginality. These recommendations align with Critical Race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s formative work on Intersectionality, which acknowledges how multiple aspects of a person’s identity routinely intersect to shape human experience. Intersectional approaches thus compel scholars to consider the complex experiences and needs of people who occupy multiple axes of oppression. This open session will bring together researchers using intersectional methods to inform policy and practice responses to the enduring problem of health inequity in multicultural societies. It will feature critical discussion of notable ethical, theoretical, and methodological challenges and opportunities created when intersectional approaches are centred in efforts to build more equitable healthcare systems.