Interview with Dr. Kyriaki Topidi

The volume Minority Women, Rights and Intersectionality brings together diverse voices to explore the intersection of minority rights and gender. What motivated you and the editorial team to initiate this project? 

The study of the intersection between gender and minority identity has been a research priority of the Cluster on Culture and Diversity. We organised an international workshop at the ECMI to gather insights on the state of research in the field of minority studies and realised that there is a research gap in understanding how minority women as affected by their vulnerability as both women and members of minority groups. The current anti-gender climate on a global scale made the idea of further research even more timely and compelling. 

Your own contribution, co-authored with Jody Metcalfe, focuses on Digital Self-Representation of Minority Women. Could you share the central argument of this chapter and how it fits into the book’s overall narrative? 

The main focus of the chapter is on digital forms of self-representation of national minority women. We discuss Sami women through the lens of colonial legacies of forced assimilation and lasting colonial gender dynamics. We show how their engagement with environmental activism has created online decolonial representations on how they are and at the same time spearheaded inter-Sami and inter-indigenous solidarity. Methodologically, we have tried to capture in detail digital processes of identity production in intersectional terms in order to offer a framework connecting digital self-representation with minority identity. 

Intersectionality has become an indispensable analytical tool, yet its practical application remains challenging. How did the contributors negotiate theoretical complexity while maintaining empirical relevance? 

The book gathers diverse researcher voices that engage with key minority/relevant concepts such as discrimination, inequality, agency or participation, to name a few, from a gender perspective. The collection aimed to apply a largely theoretical frame, such as intersectionality, into more concrete policy contexts in order to show its relevance and transformative potential in our understandings of vulnerability. The more empirical accounts included in the volume have attempted to situate individuals and groups in their contexts and show how minority women can defy their situational disadvantage and create complex identities, using their agency. 

In your view, what are the main methodological or ethical challenges when linking intersectionality with legal and policy-based approaches to minority protection? 

Within my Cluster, I am currently developing policy-related work for an international organization that looks at the contribution of national minority women in peaceful societies. This line of research has clearly showed us the complexity of research in the field: for example, we tend to assume that all minority women belong to a more or less homogenous group. This is false. To capture this diversity, sensitive and ethical research should call for the use in this context of tools to understand and problematize the issues at hand in a highly contextual and circumstantial way. Minority groups and the women within them have agency and evolve and so does their position and needs. Research should follow these changes and shifts. 

We recently won an award for a UN sponsored competition on Emerging Voices in Minority Research together with our intern Sophie Cooper that precisely illustrated these challenges. Through digital storytelling, Sophie collected eight portraits of national minority women from the region of Schleswig-Holstein to show the diversity of their identities and needs. When navigating the interviews, she invited the participants to create their stories themselves, leaving them to space to show who they were in their own terms. The result of her work indeed showcases how minority women are complex but an asset to our societies and can be watched here. 

How does this book contribute to the broader aims of the Routledge Advances in Minority Studies series? Would you say it sets a tone for the kind of interdisciplinary and global dialogue RAMS seeks to promote? 

Routledge Advances in Minority Studies is an ambitious editorial project: it constitutes a platform for outstanding state-of-the-art research on interdisciplinary and intersectional understandings of minorities, globally. We strive for interdisciplinarity and have so far included volumes from Anthropology, Law, Politics, Sociology, History and beyond. We promote and support pluralism and diversity of both authors and subjects of study, with a particular focus on emerging fields and marginalized voices. At the same time, we remain aware that Minority Studies are often met with political resistance and increasingly with instrumentalization and securitization rationales. Still, we hope that the broad range of work that the Series hosts will help epistemic communities develop a less politicized perspective of the field. 

The book crosses traditional academic boundaries — from law to digital media, sociology and anthropology. Was this interdisciplinarity part of the initial design, or did it emerge organically through the contributions? 

Minority-related research today is unambiguously interdisciplinary. Impactful research on minority groups, especially if intersectional, calls for mixed methodologies, cross-reference of conceptual frameworks and disciplinary tools in order to gain impact and relevance. This is why, very often, the output of our work at the ECMI, including in academic publications, develops such interdisciplinary outlook. The field of digital studies and its intersection with minority studies is a perfect illustration of how this interdisciplinarity operates.