An Intersectional Perspective in Social Work and Education

In this article we will describe fundamental results of the European Union (Grundtvig) project IGIV – Implementation Guideline for an Intersectional Peer Violence Preventive Work (Stuve et al. 2011). For the need analysis individual and group interviews have been conducted including a wide variety of social nongovernmental and public organizations working in the field of diversity and violence prevention. The intersectional concept also will be introduced as a critical perspective on dominance relations for the field of social work and education. The needs analysis exposed, that different dominance relations play different roles in the countries and also in different working fields. It became obvious that specifically tailored implementation strategies might be needed regarding social work and education with focus on anti-discrimination work and violence prevention. An intersectional approach which always considers the concrete life conditions of the target group of educational programmes and social work support such a tailored implementation. In the last part of the article we expose examples for the implementation of an intersectional approach in education and discuss consequences for pedagogy.