# Justice at the interface: advancing community and health system resilience through intersectionality theory

## TL;DR

This paper suggests using intersectionality theory to better understand and improve health system and community resilience by considering social processes and power dynamics.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is proposing intersectionality theory as a methodological lens to analyze resilience through social processes and power dynamics.

## Key findings

- Current resilience approaches often neglect social processes and power dynamics.
- Using intersectionality theory can reveal practical constraints at the community-health system interface.
- This approach highlights the role of community actors' intersecting identities and lived experiences.

## Abstract

Current approaches to health system resilience tend to prioritize system-level outcomes (e.g. functionality) while overlooking key underlying social processes, contexts, and power-laden interactions through which resilience is produced. When community resilience is subsumed under health system resilience, without attending to distinct contextual factors, it can lead to fragmented approaches or maladaptive outcomes that misalign with the resilience of communities. Therefore, resilience approaches need to include additional methods that incorporate analyses of power structures and context. We propose intersectionality theory as a methodological lens to investigate the underlying social processes and power dynamics that shape community resilience and health system resilience interactions. An intersectionality approach prompts researchers to distinguish how resilience capacity is derived through the involvement of community actors, their unique intersecting social identities, and their lived experiences. Including an intersectional lens in resilience approaches provides researchers with the tools to identify points of practical constraints that arise at the intersection of communities and health systems, with particular attention on the burdens that are placed on community actors.