Black women and girls are invisible. Invisible in society, invisible in research, invisible in discourse, policies, practice, and praxis. They are invisible in large part because of the tendency in our society to treat race, gender, and other socially constructed identities as mutually exclusive categories of experiences.
This new trans-institutional Vanderbilt Community Lab (VCL) for the Intersectional Study of Black Women and Girls in Society draws on the intellectual resources in sociology, law, STEM, education, African American and Diaspora Studies, religious studies, divinity, and health to create a transdisciplinary hub of research, discovery, and teaching activities centered on elevating and understanding structural barriers and forms of resilience Black women and girls experience across various social contexts in society, and how intersectional interventions might be created to expand opportunities and increase pathways to success. We do this through creating, evaluating, and synthesizing cutting-edge scholarship.