Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies Journal

Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies Special Issue on Intersectionality and the Body

Call for Expression of Interest 

Deadline: 30 September 2026

The intersectionality framework has recently enriched the study of health inequalities by showing how systems of power and social positions (including social class, race/ethnicity and migration status, gender, sexuality, age/generation, disability, etc.) interact to shape unequal opportunities, constraints, exposures, and lived experiences. However, intersectional research has often remained focused on social or psychosocial outcomes, with more limited engagement with developmental, functional, physiological and biological processes.

Research on embodiment and the social-to-biological transition, by contrast, has long examined how social exposures “get under the skin” through psychosocial, behavioural, environmental, functional and biological pathways across the life course. By treating the body neither as a purely biological object nor as a marginal dimension of social life, this field appears well positioned to integrate intersectional perspectives and to better understand how intersecting systems of power and social relations shape embodiment processes and contribute to the production of unequal bodies, functional and health trajectories, and mortality patterns.

However, bringing intersectionality and social-to-[body/biology/health] research into dialogue raises important conceptual and methodological challenges. These include how to identify, articulate and distinguish social and biological mechanisms, as well as how to critically produce and examine the categories, measures, and causal assumptions, particularly regarding the risk of naturalising socially produced differences or reducing structural processes to individual-level characteristics.

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