*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

As the spring semester of 2025 began at the University of St. Andrews, our module (IR4589: Intersectionality and Social Justice) started with gloom and despair rather than the excitement of a new module with the opportunity to learn. A week earlier, Donald Trump, the newly elected US president, signed an executive order titled 'Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Programs And Preferencing'. This executive order aimed to dismantle DEI initiatives within the federal government, asserting that such programs were discriminatory and not aligned with merit-based principles. Big Tech and private corporations also quickly followed suit by cancelling DEI programs.  Critical race theory, gender, intersectionality, social justice research, and activism have been in the crosshairs of the ‘culture wars,’ making their way to the centre of far-right politics. Intersectionality sees oppression as a complex phenomenon made up of simultaneously intersecting systems of power - such as race, gender, class, age and so on - requiring focus on why/how/where/when they intersect to comprehend and address them fully.  Even before the announcement, Intersectionality has long been the target of far-right (and far-left) political forces as it challenges the status quo more than any other theory (Collins and Bilge, 2020: 32-33). Unsurprisingly, DEI programs have been scapegoated for a wide range of problems—from economic troubles and waning global political influence to rising inflation, an uptick in crime rates, and even fatal aircraft collisions.

Despite the palpable shock and despondency reigning at the outset, we deliberately chose to remain vigilant and resist growing authoritarian, anti-intellectual, and regressive tendencies. We decided to speak truth to power via our mutual creation of weekly Intersectional Care Diaries. In Intersectional Care Diaries, the class would share brief individual reflections on intersectional oppressions in spaces around us, contemplating how care can be imagined in response. This was a voluntary, interactive practice to apply key themes of the module to real-world scenarios. These writings were scattered nodes of resistance in response to what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994) call ‘scattered hegemonies.’ Here hegemony is decentralised and diffused so that it becomes easily embedded into our everyday lives. We explored power dynamics across spaces, scales, and levels, engaging with contentious political issues from intimate and institutional settings—such as classrooms and cultural venues—to broader questions of environmental justice, structural privilege, legal reform, and the lived struggles of self and marginalised communities.

Over the past few weeks, we have gathered numerous pearls of collective wisdom, prompting us to wonder—what if we wove them together into a piece of writing that captures the power of collective thought and the interconnectedness of our ideas? We have been exploring and thinking through intersecting systems of oppression, injustice and disadvantage. Drawing inspiration from these experiences, we pondered over what it could become if we also let our reflections and care diaries intersect in themselves, engaging in a chain dialogue of deliberation. Suddenly, the canvas was filled with numerous shapes and colours– connecting, reinforcing, empowering, enriching, and inquiring into each other in ways we had barely imagined. This collage of mutually constitutive reflections bridges our classroom dialogues with the political praxis of intersectionality and social justice at the local, national, and global levels.

This co-production was thus itself an act of resistance, an act of love and care for the values and principles of social justice that we hold dearly, and it was consciously embraced as an antidote to the politics of hatred, intolerance, and violence which often masquerade as deformed and distorted notions of love.

Love and care in the classroom

From abstract philosophical concepts to everyday praxis, love is omnipresent. Love means different things to different people and comes with its intricate dimensions, scopes, and properties. However, this omnipresence and seamless variety make it daunting to define and measure; it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Our conception of love and........

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