Introduction

The celebration of 70 years of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA) is an apt time to consider contemporary challenges and discussions within industrial relations (IR), and this chapter is a contribution to those discussions. More specifically, it examines the relationship between intersectionality and IR, which continues to be ambiguous, undefined and full of tensions. At the same time, it is full of conceptual, theoretical, methodological and empirical possibilities. In 2006 and 2015, Holgate et al (2006) and McBride et al (2015), respectively, challenged us to pay more attention to gender, difference and intersectionality in the field of work and employment relations. More recently, Heery (2016: 171, 197) has noted that engagement with the gendered nature of the employment relationship is one of the most ‘noticeable changes in writing about work and employment in recent times’, with intersectionality ‘currently the hottest concept within critical writing on equality and diversity’. This chapter is an attempt to more critically examine the use of the concept of intersectionality within IR and engage with the recent call by Lee and Tapia (2021: 1) for the ‘incorporation of critical race and intersectional theory into IR to address the erasure of vital counter-narratives and to expand our empirical cases for labor and employment research’.

Within the confines of this short chapter, and inspired by Edward Said's (1983) idea of a travelling theory and Salem's (2018) application of it in relation to intersectionality, we explore how intersectionality, as grounded in discussions within feminist critical race theory, has been treated in IR scholarship. We develop our arguments from the reading of approximately 30 articles published in IR and IR-associated journals using the terms ‘intersectional’ and ‘intersectionality’. While this continues to be ‘work in progress’, we identify three trends from this initial scoping of such texts and a spectrum of usage. This ranges from the symbolic – where the term ‘intersectionality’ justifies the study of a more representative sample of workers, with no reference to its origins in critical race theory – through to those articles that actively engage with the concept as a means of using critical race theory to raise challenging questions for IR scholarship. We recognize the discussion of labour issues in other journals and return to a consideration of these work-related studies appearing outside of IR.