Reframing the global poverty and inequality narrative in development education through the lens of intersectionality

The effort to promote interdisciplinary research in development and global education risks the erosion of its core values by more theoretically established fields of development. This becomes urgent when little research attention is given to strengthening the theoretical foundation of core concepts and themes, such as global poverty and inequality, that are grounded in knowledge from field experience. This article responds to the influence of neoclassical literature about poverty and spatial inequality that propagates a discourse shift from poor countries to poor people. Intersectionality is explored as a paradigm that can reconcile this new thinking with the social justice pedagogy of development education and that enables an understanding of the asymmetries in current patterns of poverty and spatial inequality.