Introduction

This chapter illustrates how an intersectional approach can excavate ‘the social’ in social policy analysis, not only at national and local/ interpersonal scales but at global scales too. It focuses on the forces at the global scale that have shaped the development of post-financial crisis (austerity) welfare and it explains how this should be understood in terms of the intersections between the crises of global financialized capitalism, of care, of ecology and of racialized transnational mobilities. In elaborating this framework, the chapter aims to extend the application of intersectionality to social policy, and, in line with this, to bring ‘the social’ into a political economy analysis of neoliberal welfare.

Intersectionality provides an understanding of social inequalities and power as complex, interlinked, shifting and multifaceted, constituting both penalties and privileges. It is an approach in which analysis and practice are closely linked (Box 10.1). It has enjoyed an important comeback in the social sciences and humanities since the 2000s from its origins in black feminist theory and politics of the 1980s. Yet the application to social policy of its contemporary tenets around theory, method and praxis has been both relatively limited and relatively recent. While it has been used to inform research and analysis of the multiple dimensions of social exclusion, discrimination and hierarchy at local and national scales in austerity welfare societies (for example, Bassel and Emejulu, 2018; Women’s Budget Group, 2017), less consideration has been given to developing an intersectional approach at a global scale, in spite of important feminist, post-colonial and ecological resistance to, and scholarship on, global capitalism.