We invite you to a symposium organized by LEAADS@psu on Addressing Intersectionality to Transform Leadership at Penn State.

We will engage in interdisciplinary dialogue within our Penn State community in order to build understanding of the effects of intersectionality on success and leadership in academia with the goal of identifying pathways for transformational action and informing future initiatives.

Intersectionality asks us to unveil the structures of privilege and power that maintain systems of discrimination and marginalization of minority groups and to particularly examine how simple, one-dimensional categorization of discrimination and bias can hide these patterns. By calling attention to the ways in which laws, policies, structures, and biases can focus on particular groups and ignore others, the concept of intersectionality is a call to action to identify how systemic barriers maintain systems of exclusion, marginalization, or oppression. Within academia, the interface among race, gender, economic class, sexuality, and other categorizations is poorly examined yet continues to stifle calls for diversity, inclusion, and the advancement of historically marginalized groups. Recent experiences with COVID-19 and anti-racist reckoning have concomitantly revealed and heightened some of these vulnerabilities. How do we address intersectionality while transforming institutional systems? How do we incorporate intersectionality into considerations of academic inclusion, advancement, and leadership?