New visual methods for teaching intersectionality from a spatial perspective in a geography and gender course

Abstract

Intersectionality is a complex concept to deal with when doing research but also when teaching the interrelationships between space and social relations. Here we present “Relief Maps” as a visual tool for teaching intersectionality and its spatial dimension in higher education courses. “Relief Maps” are a model developed for research and applied in a Geography and Gender course at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) with the aim of promoting student reflection on the relationships between power structures, places and lived experiences, starting from their everyday lives.

Keywords:

• Intersectionality
• feminism
• “Relief Maps”
• methodology
• lived experience
• space

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to all the students that allowed us to use their work for this paper.

Notes

1. The Spanish curricula system is quite inflexible so that there are limited free choices for students. This subject has to compete every year with a pool of well-stablished subjects and other, mainly technical, that have expanded greatly since the 1990’s in the same period as the development of gender geography (Garcia-Ramon, 2011).