Intersectionality in Family Therapy Leadership : Professional Power, Personal Identities

This brief examines the ways in which sociocultural characteristics and contexts intersect to create varying dimensions of social advantage and inequality that, in turn, affect and organize professional relationships in educational and therapeutic settings. It explores how inherently hierarchical relationships develop within educational and university contexts, including between professors and students, supervisors and supervisees, clinicians and clients, and administrators and faculty members. The volume addresses how participants’ social locations inform their roles and actions and how they can hold positions of power while also embodying a marginalized identities.

In addition, the book draws on perspectives of persons marginalized or privileged based on their race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and/or gender to examine how social location impacts their work as family therapy clinicians, supervisors, instructors, and administrators. Grounded in individual reflection and detailed experiences, each chapter describes rich personal narrative on how the individual therapist’s intersecting social locations influence his/her professional relationships. This book highlights the need for family therapists to identify their social location characteristics, evaluate the impact of their social location on their professional relationships, and process the role social location has on their academic, supervisory and clinical position. This volume is an essential resource for clinicians and practitioners, researchers and professors, and graduate students in family studies, clinical psychology, and public health as well as all interrelated disciplines.

Karen Quek, Ph.D., LMFT, LPCC, is the program director and professor in the marriage and family therapy program at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. She also serves as MFT consultant with various educational institutions and community agencies in the United States and internationally. Her scholarship focuses on how the intersection of dominant discourses shape social locations, and how professionals address the interplay of various diversity constructs in their practices. She has contributed substantially to academic literature on relational changes associated with marginalization, diversity, power, and multiculturalism. Dr. Quek’s teaching, research, and clinical practice are based on her love for the field in marriage and family therapy.

Alexander Hsieh, Ph.D., is a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) and core faculty member for a COAMFTE accredited MFT program at Alliant International University. Dr. Hsieh has been providing individual, couple, and family therapy for more than 10 years. He specializes in working with interracial couples, cultural identity and formation, adolescent internalized issues, and juvenile delinquent youth. Dr. Hsieh obtained his doctorate in marriage and family therapy from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, and his MA in marriage and family therapy from Abilene Christian University, Abilene, TX. He conducts diversity and multicultural research in cultural awareness research in academia, cultural humility, cultural identity formation, and interracial marriage.