Making the child-rights identity detached from its social context and the possibility of self-identification serves to protect the child from traditional and social harmful practices directed toward children. At the same time, the monist identity of the child becomes placed out of reach of democratic deliberations and self-determination. The intersectionality of race and gender becomes two socially constructed concepts that cannot be addressed within the child-rights identity, which both serves to protect the child from discrimination but also risks making child rights detached from addressing crucial structural inequalities based on race and gender.

This chapter reviews varieties of British English that have developed in South Asian communities around the United Kingdom. There is no single British Asian English; rather, the term can be used to describe a diverse range of regional sub-varieties. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority in the United Kingdom, with large concentrations in urban areas across England, including London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford. In addition to large demographic numbers, a reason for the emergence of distinctive varieties in South Asian communities is the historical presence of English in South Asian countries, reinforcing systematic divergences from British English speech norms. The chapter reviews the history of British South Asian communities in recent decades, and then describes an array of features of these regional varieties: phonetics and phonology, lexicon, and grammar, as well as at the level of discourse and conversational interaction, where systematic signals of identity and ideology can be observed in speech style variation and code-switching.

This chapter delves into mass criminalization and mass incarceration. It examines the role that race plays at each level of the criminal justice system from the initial decision of law enforcement officials to engage with members of the public through to the trial and sentencing phases. Throughout, we seek to understand and illustrate the impact of individual bias and structural discrimination. We then end by highlighting the enormous racial disparities that the system fosters and by considering several alternative avenues for reform.

Women from Black, South Asian and other ethnic minority groups experience gendered racism. Gender and race intersect in such a way that Black and ethnic minoritised women are not only sometimes afraid of seeking help from mental care, but also are invisible to services and their needs are ignored. There has been a significant tension in feminism between respecting culture and faith and attention to women’s human rights (cultural relativism). However, when women feel entrapped within their families and culture and are subject to forced marriage, domestic violence or FGM, resulting in major mental health problems and suicide, we cannot condone abuse and violence. Black women’s mental health and wellbeing is an important focus for Black feminism, which was largely excluded from second-wave feminism. Concepts of ‘mental illness’ do not always fit easily with personal healing that focuses on emotional and spiritual growth and overcoming oppression. Cultural humility is essential and its crucial for services to collaborate with NGOs that are trusted by the women in communities and run by them. As women we must call out discrimination and racism and challenge it.

In this chapter we will explore how the intersection of identities impacts the well-being of LGBTQ+ individuals. This chapter begins by providing an overview of intersectionality and discusses the multiple oppressions that individuals with multiple marginalized identities encounter, and also how community and generational strengths have and continue to help them counter intersecting oppressions. This chapter will also explore how counselors can conceptualize the concerns of LGBTQ+ individuals from a culturally sustaining, intersectional lens that acknowledges not only the resilience of these individuals and their communities but also the historical and current systems and levels of oppression that continue to create the need for resilience.

The minority stress model, based on the theory of minority stress, serves as a primary framework to understand mental health disparities among LGBTQ+ individuals. In this chapter, we describe the model and its relationship with the social determinants of health and multiple minority stress. Interventions and evidence-based practices incorporating this model and barriers to care are discussed.

This chapter explores the lifespan identity development of LGB individuals throughout childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and older adulthood. Identity models are explored and applied to various age groups. The chapter includes applicable case studies. Included are examinations of themes that LGB people experience over the lifespan, including managing identity disclosure, intersectionality, and biopsychological, environmental, and political factors that impact development.

This chapter challenges the myth that rural communities lack racial diversity and that “rural” is synonymous with “white.” The chapter addresses in particular the misconception that, where rural regions do overrepresent white people, there is something natural or innate about the connection between rurality and whiteness. The chapter uses a critical-legal lens to examine the history and modern conditions associated with rural landownership and livelihoods. This analysis helps illustrate, in the words of Jess Shoemaker, “how rural landscapes got so white.” Certain experiences of the Gullah-Geechee people of South Carolina offer a case study for exploring heirs’ property, racial discrimination, and other mechanisms used to contribute to rural racial minorities’ land dispossession. The discussion demonstrates how property law, federal interventions, and other areas of law have facilitated the construction of rural regions as disproportionately white and racially stratified. Once again, the analysis reveals how rural America is a manmade project of public creation, rather than the product of benign or natural forces.

Inquiries into rural conditions are sometimes viewed as not worth pursuing in the first place. This chapter takes on “foundational myths,” or assumptions that make “rural” seem uncompelling as an investigative lens. The myth of rural hyper-simplicity suggests that rural challenges can be solved with easy, one-size-fits-all interventions, such as rural residents relocating. Conversely, the myth of rural hyper-complexity suggests that the rural United States is so vast and diverse that to pursue analyses beyond specific regions is an exercise in futility. Finally, the myth of rural immateriality suggests that “rural” is not an interesting or relevant lens, as other analytical frames (such as a population’s race or national origin) are more explanatory. The chapter addresses these myths by offering a definition of “rural” that incorporates intersectionality theory, highlights common challenges associated with population sparseness and remoteness from urban centers, and reveals rurality’s salience to law. This chapter introduces the concept of “urbanormativity,” or the treatment of rural conditions as deviant or incomprehensible. The chapter summarizes scholarly explorations of urbanormitivity in rural sociology and law and rurality. It seeks to establish that rural conditions are complex, but they have common themes that are capable and worthy of being understood and addressed.

While Latina literature cannot be understood as an absolute phenomenon but rather as a heterogeneous cultural practice drawing from the diverse genealogies of women’s specific ethnic backgrounds, the attempt to challenge gender norms, heteronormativity, and power relations must be considered paramount. As demonstrated in the influential writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, the act of writing is a powerful tool of liberation that embraces the potentiality of collective creativity and oppositional consciousness, what this essay terms the insubordination of Latina literature. This approach foregrounds texts that formulate discursive acts in which literary and political categories propose radical social and cultural transformations. I begin by examining the works of Anzaldúa and Moraga, whom I consider prominent contributors to a U.S. Latina literary renaissance emerging after the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements. In the essay’s second half, I trace the development of U.S. Latina literature in the 20th century’s last two decades and the 21st century, reading Latina literature in the context of queer, lesbian, and feminist epistemologies.

This chapter decouples queerness from whiteness, and modernism from its period origins, arguing that queer-of-color modernists like Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Matthew Lopez transform the coordinates of queerness and modernism through their misfit intersections of identity, also extending the timeframe for modernist aesthetics through a queer genealogy that extends backwards (as in Lopez’s The Inheritance, which features E.M. Forster) and forwards (as in Larsen’s Passing and its intersectional queer subtext, cinematically adapted by Rebecca Hall in 2021).