February Lunch&Learn: What's Your Street-Race, Class, Gender? The Urgency of Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry and Praxis for Advancing Health Equity

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We are delighted to welcome Nancy López, Professor of Sociology from the University of New Mexico, for our February Lunch&Learn. Dr. López’s scholarship centers on intersectionality as both a critical analytic framework and a praxis for advancing health equity. Her work examines how race and racialization, gender, class, and other social locations intersect across the life course, and how systems of power, privilege, oppression, and resistance shape health outcomes for women, children, and families.

For this Lunch&Learn, Dr. López will present What’s Your Street? Race, Class, Gender? The Urgency of Intersectionality as Critical Inquiry and Praxis for Advancing Health Equity, offering a compelling case for intersectionality as a unifying and transformative framework for public health research, surveillance, policy, and ethical practice.

Itinerary

12:00pm - 12:05pm | Welcome and introductions

12:05pm - 12:45pm | Lunch&Learn presentation

12:45pm - 12:55pm | Moderated Q&A session

12:55pm - 13:00pm | Closing and upcoming sessions

Location

This is an online webinar hosted on Zoom. To receive details to enter the event, please register.

Featured Speaker

Nancy López

Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of New Mexico

Nancy López PhD is a professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. Dr. López is co-founder and past director of the Institute for the Study of "Race" and Social Justice (2009-2024). Her scholarship, teaching, and service are guided by the insights of intersectionality--the importance of examining the simultaneity of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and other systems of inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, health, employment, and housing, for developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. Dr. López is the author of Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race & Gender Disparity in Urban Education (2003); co-editor of Creating Alternative Discourses in the Education of Latinas & Latinos (2003), Mapping "Race": Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research (2013); and QuantCrit: An Antiracist Approach to Education Equity (2023).  Dr. López’s current research projects include: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a study on “Employing an Intersectionality Framework in Revising Office of Management and Budget Standards for Collecting Administrative Race and Ethnicity Data" for illuminating the difference between race (visual social status/street race) and ethnicity (cultural heritage) for interrogating inequalities. She is also co-PI for research funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on “Climate for Latino Students: Employing Intersectionality for Understanding Latino Student Success in Higher Education;” the Hewlett Foundation and the WT Grant Foundation for a mixed-methods research project on the impact of high school ethnic studies classes for reducing intersectional inequalities; and the Spencer Foundation for a planning grant to conduct a study on "Envisioning the Transformation of Measures and Analysis of Structural and Systemic Racism." Dr. López is Black Latina, New York City-born daughter of Dominican immigrants with a second-grade education rich in cultural wealth. She is the first woman of color tenured in Sociology, and the first woman of the African Diaspora tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences (2008) and promoted to full professor (2018) at UNM. 

Suggested Readings

• Vargas, E. D., Juarez, M., Stone, L. C., & López, N. (2019).
  Critical “street race” praxis: Advancing the measurement of racial discrimination among diverse Latinx communities in the U.S.
  Critical Public Health, 31(4), 381–391.
  https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2019.1695040

• Irizarry, Y., Vargas, E., & López, N. (2023).
  Necessary research for revising OMB’s race and ethnicity standards.
  Federal Register public comment (Comment ID: OMB-2023-0001-19545; Tracking ID: lgz-lqlz-434p).
  https://www.regulations.gov/comment/OMB-2023-0001-19545

• Lowe, R. H., Irizarry, Y., López, N., Vargas, E., & Montufar, S. (2025).
  Black and “some other race”: Examining shifts in the Black Latino population in the Census Bureau’s 2020 race question.
  Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 0(0).
  https://doi.org/10.1177/23326492251360333

• López, N., & Gadsden, V. L. (2017).
  Health inequities, social determinants, and intersectionality.
  In Perspectives on health equity and social determinants of health (pp. 9–30). National Academies Press.
  https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27117/perspectives-on-health-equity-and-social-determinants-of-health

What are Lunch&Learn's?

The CAnD3 Lunch&Learn series is designed to introduce our Fellows, team members, and partners to emerging research on topics related to population dynamics and population aging. These modules will cover the  Four CAnD3 Population Aging Axes: (1) family and social inclusion; (2) education, labour and inequality; (3) migration and ethnicity; and (4) wellbeing and autonomy.

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