Fieldwork was conducted from September 2011 to May 2014 in the following cities: Glasgow, Edinburgh, (Scotland); London, Manchester, Coventry (England); Paris, Parisian suburbs, Lyon (France). Locating our research in large capitals as well as smaller cities enabled us to compare the experiences of minority women and third sector workers who were located in dense networks (for example London, Paris) with those in areas with smaller, less dense networks (for example Coventry, Glasgow). Participation in, and contact with members of, the Oxfam Routes to Solidarity project event, which focuses on the north of England, also provided further basis for comparison in the fieldwork in England.

Our sample included third sector workers (directors, policy officers and development workers), activist minority women and civil servants (primarily in Scotland) and local government officials with a brief for equalities and/or the third sector. We have selected third sector organisations that are:

• • traditional social welfare service providers;

• • hybrid organisations combining advocacy and campaigning with service provision;

• • organisations offering so-called ‘militant provision’ – crisis relief and political organising for destitute and/or undocumented migrants;

• • campaigning and policy advocacy organisations that are not involved in service provision and are closer to social movements, in that they situate their activity at the edge of social service provision.

While women's organisations and feminist organisations are included in the sample, they were not our focus, as we wanted to explore the extent to which intersectional work – which makes connections between race, gender, legal status and other forms of inequality – was being undertaken by mainstream organisations.

By ‘minority women’ we refer to women who experience the effects of processes of racialisation, class and gender inequality as well as other sources of inequality, particularly hierarchies of legal status

We therefore include migrant women in the study. We do not use an essentialist understanding of identity, but one that is process-based and outcome-based. We are therefore also able to encompass the ways in which identity is understood differently across contexts by women themselves (that is, ‘difference blind’ France, multicultural England).