From barriers to bridges: Actors actively shaping intersectional equality policy-making in R&I
Authors: Beeckmans, Joanna, Pajares Sánchez, Lorena
Type: Working paper
Published: 2026-08-03
Keywords: Intersectionality, Research and innovation, Resistance

<p>Over the past three years, the Knowledge and Support Hub (KSH) 3 on Intersectionality has built an extensive and innovative evidence base for advancing intersectional equality policy-making in Research and Innovation (R&I). This work has drawn on multiple, complementary sources: 10 in-depth case studies across European Higher Education and Research (HE&R) organisations, 4 Communities of Practice (CoPs), and five Knowledge Exchange Events (KEE) bringing together our CoPs, KSH experts and leaders, practitioners, academics, and policy stakeholders.</p>
<p>These collective efforts have informed a series of Working Papers that address a central question: How can intersectionality be translated into a praxis for R&I policy-making? We argue that such a focus on praxis is crucial as it moves the discussion from “what is an intersectional policy” to “how to do intersectionality in policy-making” to foster and sustain institutional change. Across the series, the objective has therefore been to bridge persistent gaps between theory and practice, critique and strategy, and academic and practitioner communities.</p>
<p>The Working Paper series has progressively mapped this challenge across different levels of analysis. Working Paper (WP) 1 established the conceptual foundations by mapping the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of translating intersectionality’s ambitions into actionable practice. WP2 focused on current key barriers to “do” intersectionality to , including limited knowledge on intersectionality, single-axis approaches to equality, and the lack of methodologies to examine intersectional policies. WP3 discussed how intersectionality operates not only as an analytical lens but especially as a political strategy within policy-making to foster change, shaped by both facilitating and hampering (extra-)organisational factors. WP4 shifts from the macro level (mapping structural barriers and knowledge gaps) and the meso level (examining how organisations leverage facilitating factors and overcome barriers), to the micro level, engaging with the role of actors as “bridge builders” (Montoya & Seminario, 2022) in overcoming barriers and fostering change towards intersectional equality.</p>
<p>In this Working Paper, we argue that there needs to be a shift in how we understand intersectional policies. Rather than evaluating whether institutions have designed and implemented a fully-fledged “intersectional policy”, we adopt an alternative approach that identifies “traces of intersectionality”: existing policies and practices through which intersectionality is already being enacted. While these traces may be partial, informal, or even fragile, they provide entry points to further develop and can constitute the building blocks of broader change processes towards institutional change (Beeckmans et al. 2026). This approach overcomes the risk to reproduce binary logics of presence versus absence, when intersectionality is destined to remain an unattainable ideal or a rhetoric “buzzword”. In doing so, it highlights how intersectional equality policy-making is not only a matter of policy design and implementation, but a political process involving actors’ agency, negotiation strategies, and collective action to counter intersecting inequalities within R&I.</p>
<p>The paper is structured into three parts: first, the purpose of the fourth Knowledge Exchange Event (KEE4) is explained, which brought together KSH leaders, experts and CoPs to reflect on how institutional actors navigate constraints and develop strategies to sustain change. Second, the knowledge exchange insights are presented to discuss ways to move beyond symbolic commitments on paper to the agents and communities of change who actively shape intersectional equality policy-making in practice. Finally, insights from some of our CoPs and KSH experts are collected.</p>