Salient Circles Diagrams: Making Intersectional Identities, Privilege, Power, and Marginalization Visible

Abstract

The Salient Circles Diagram is a teaching exercise designed to help participants visually display the relative importance and intersections of their most personally salient identities (e.g., identity as a woman or as a person of color). This activity has been used with hundreds of participants in undergraduate and graduate classes and training programs, continuing education events with psychology professionals, and diversity trainings with non-psychology professionals. Group discussion of the diagrams creates space for dialogue about why some identities are salient and some may be invisible, systems of privilege, power, and marginalization, and how cultural, structural, and individual factors sustain them.

Keywords:

• Identity
• intersectionality
• marginalized
• privilege
• teaching activity
• teaching exercise

Notes

*This activity was adapted by NiCole T. Buchanan, Ph.D., inspired by Dr. J. Landrum-Brown, Director, UIUC Program on Intergroup Relations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

NiCole T. Buchanan

NiCole T. Buchanan was the recipient of the 2015 Mary Roth Walsh Teaching the Psychology of Women Award from the American Psychological Association’s Society for Psychology of Women (Division 35) on the basis of this teaching exercise.