WS G: Understanding Gender and Race in Diverse European Contexts

This workshop will explore the importance of understanding and including race and gender in European educational research.  It will give some context and provide illustrations of the diverse ways in which race and gender intersect in complex ways that are often hard to identify and classify. The presenters will give some examples of what happens when race, gender and their intersections are not acknowledged in research. 

Workshop Objectives:

• To explore how a researcher’s perspective shapes their research focus and the analysis of their data
• To raise awareness of the risk of bias in the interpretation of findings, taking account of the impact of lived experience
• To sensitise researchers to the complexity of intersectionality and the many layers of positionality which have the potential to distort research results

By the end of this session, participants will be better able to:

• Identify and eliminate the propensity for personal perspectives to influence the interpretation of research data.

Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on their positionality. They will be invited to apply these concepts to their own research contexts, merging these with their background knowledge about race, gender and their intersections. 

In the course of our discussions, we will analyse the challenges in using demographic data sets which focus on single characteristics such as gender and race.  We will consider the impact of an itemised approach to data and how this can be circumvented to adopt an intersectional lens which more accurately represents the complex reality of diverse individuals.