InterEmp: Strengthening through Intersectionality

Project Description

The project focuses on developing comprehensive conceptualizations and practice-oriented strategies for intersectional empowerment and power sharing among migrant-positioned women and girls through diversity-sensitive support and counselling approaches.

Empowerment is widely recognized as an important factor in enhancing educational opportunities and a key prerequisite for structural power sharing. However, practitioners often criticize the concept as being “vague” and “imprecise,” despite its widespread use. There remains a lack of practice-oriented frameworks, and it is often unclear whether empowerment should be understood as a method, a professional stance, a theoretical concept, or a political strategy for action. Moreover, empowerment and intersectionality are rarely considered together, with interventions frequently focusing on only a single dimension of diversity. Such approaches fail to address the realities of groups facing multidimensional barriers to access and participation, such as migrant-positioned women and girls. Context-sensitive and theoretically grounded concepts are therefore essential for both research and practice.

It is also widely acknowledged that empowerment requires power sharing in order to be effective—that is, an awareness of and willingness to share power that derives from social privilege. In collaboration with the practice partners “Mpower” and “DaMigra,” this research-practice partnership will conceptualize intersectional empowerment and power sharing, pilot and test these approaches in practice, and develop recommendations for good practice and policy governance.

Organisations

Subproject: Participatory Situational Analysis and Consortium Coordination

German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM)

Subproject: Intersectional Empowerment

Mpower e.V.

Subproject: Intersectional Power Sharing

DaMigra