Editorial: Living feminist entrepreneurship scholarly praxis Free

Feminist entrepreneurship scholarship has historically had the unenviable task of making the invisible visible. Through highlighting how the gendered dimensions of society, and the social construction of gender, tend to place women entrepreneurs at significant disadvantage in relation to men, feminists have continually sought to advance debates within entrepreneurship studies (Ahl, 2006; Calás et al., 2009; Jennings and Brush, 2013; Marlow, 2020; Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025). Yet, in a metareflection of such critiques, feminist entrepreneurship scholars have often experienced similar exclusionary dynamics in academia's structures of employment and systems of knowledge production. High barriers to entry to academic conversations for feminist entrepreneurship research, exacerbated by competition within the field, have presented challenges in normalising feminist assumptions in mainstream entrepreneurship conversations, a task further hampered by the broadly uncritical conflation of “gender” with “women” and the assumed reduced importance of such dialogues (Marlow, 2020).

For this reason, we are grateful to The International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship for the dedicated space it offers to advance debate within feminist entrepreneurship research itself. In particular, we value the contributions of IJGE's recent special issue Feminist approaches to gender and entrepreneurship research (Jones et al., 2025), in which the editors bring to light the evolution and diversity of feminisms and encourage entrepreneurship scholars to more explicitly embrace feminist theory and methodologies. Jones et al. (2025) offer a detailed and informed overview of the existence of diverse feminisms and explain how these theoretical perspectives, while still being underutilised in gender and entrepreneurship research, have gradually informed contemporary debate and shifts towards more inclusive research agendas. Reflecting upon how the special issue articles illustrate pathways between theory and practice, they emphasise how crucial it is for theory to offer “actionable insights for policy and practice” (2025: 4).

In this editorial, we extend and reorientate the issues outlined by Jones et al. (2025) by focusing upon illustrating the meaning of praxis – recognising the complexity arising from diverse perspectives through the lens of our own experiences. In so doing, we demonstrate how the courses of action we take as feminist scholars, with a political commitment to challenging dominant exclusionary narratives and practices, reflect differing experiences shaped by time, context and positionality, but converge in our shared efforts to advance the field through praxis. While our motivation and responsibility to do this is personal, it is made possible by the collective efforts of feminist scholarly community. We demonstrate this through our autoethnographic vignettes, which illustrate how early work on gender (read: heterosexual, white, able-bodied cis women) has evolved to reach into a broad and growing rhizomatic web of diverse, but interlinked, issues. Academics are often criticised for being distanced from, or elevated above, the “real world”. We challenge this by delving into the real-world rationale for the formation of our beliefs and actions as feminist entrepreneurship scholars, explaining how these have emerged over time, in conversation with our fields of study, and, we hope, generated meaningful change.

Thus, building on insights from Jones et al. (2025), in this editorial, we seek to offer a complementary perspective that urges feminist researchers to enhance their commitment to feminist praxis and deepen their approach to interrogating positionality and power through explicit reflexivity, which we model with autoethnographic vignettes. Although we each hold different social positionalities and are at different career stages across three distinct institutional environments, we are inspired by Audre Lorde's (1984) work on the importance of attention to such differences in helping us to build solidarity across struggle, in our shared pursuit of advancing feminist research in entrepreneurship. Among the authors, one of us has contributed significantly to making inroads for feminist entrepreneurship research from a sociological entry point and paved a broad avenue for a range of feminist scholarship as a senior scholar, mentor and editor. The others, benefiting from this ground-breaking work in the field, have adopted explicit commitments to intersectional feminism that continue to provoke generative collaborative enquiry (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025). This previous work encouraged scholars to explore intersectionality as a conceptual starting point, a “threshold concept” (Meyer and Land, 2005) for feminist inquiry, as a means to embrace relationality, reflexivity and praxis as part of entrepreneurship scholarship.

Contemporary intersectional praxis not only challenges the gender binary and interrogates power structures that reproduce the patriarchal, neoliberal regime but also pushes to reconceptualise an entrepreneurship that includes the lived experience and knowledge of historically marginalised, new majority founders (Nelson Centre for Entrepreneurship, 2021). As such, we conceptualise intersectionality not as an endpoint but as a starting point for feminist inquiry over the threshold of which a vital critical feminist literature and method exists (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025). Over our own intersectional thresholds, we are beginning to engage with the notion of decoloniality and its potential to transform the theoretical advancements and contributions of feminist entrepreneurship studies and ideally, the academy itself. To illustrate this praxis, we offer three auto-ethnographic vignettes that explore how, from different positionalities and personal biographies, we have engaged with and attempted to advance feminist thinking in entrepreneurship research and used intersectionality as a theoretical threshold in our collective work and activism, to anchor our scholarly engagement. The research questions we explore are the following: What does our field have to learn from feminist praxis? What is the “process of becoming” of our own feminist praxes, and how has this shaped our perspectives on doing research and theory building in entrepreneurship?

The editorial proceeds as follows: first, we explore the invitations and exigencies of developing a feminist praxis in entrepreneurship studies. We then present intersectionality's praxistical challenge to a single-axis understanding of feminism and the further potential for generative complication by decolonial approaches. The heart of the piece is a set of autoethnographic vignettes in which we reflect upon how, from different positionalities and experiences, we each learned and lived into our own feminist praxes as entrepreneurship scholars, with personal experiences informing shared political commitments. We close by outlining the implications of our collective insights for theory, research practice and pedagogy.

Feminist praxis is a dialectical interplay between theory, research and practice (Rotramel, 2020), urging a commitment to feminist values that is evident in the ways one lives (Ahmed, 2017; Fonow and Cook, 1991; Hooks, 1984). Feminist approaches to science begin with a fundamental questioning of the enlightenment notion of scientific objectivity and idea of man as the universal subject (Harding, 1986; Haraway, 1988). Jones et al. (2025) illustrate the feminist stance as one that “prioritises different dimensions of women's lived experiences (p1).” And yet, we know that gender does not exist in isolation, nor is it solely responsible for the social inequalities embedded in entrepreneurship (Collins and Bilge, 2020). In her critical text, “The instabilities of the analytical categories of feminist theory,” the late Sandra Harding, who died this year, stressed the need for feminism to avoid replicating what she called patriarchal thought policing through assuming that the social experience of “Western, bourgeois, heterosexual, white women” is useful to solving the problems of any other women (1986: 646). As such, she advocates leaning into the discomfort of embracing the instability of analytical categories as a “resource for thinking and practices” (1986: 648), moving away from normalisation and towards destabilisation and from adherence to coherent theory to “fidelity to parameters of dissonance” (1986: 650) with the patriarchal discourses that shape scientific knowledge making.

How, then, does a commitment to exploring such parameters of dissonance play out in our praxis as feminist entrepreneurship scholars? A first moment arises in our desire for a more expansive view of feminist inquiry in entrepreneurship scholarship – one that problematizes not only the universalist comparison of men and women's lived experiences common to entrepreneurship studies but also narrowly defined, binary conceptualisations of gender. A more complex and “queered” conception of gender (Butler, 1990; Sedgwick, 1990) would invite curiosity about how feminine, masculine, intersex, gender-nonconforming, queer and trans identities are affected by the broader context of norms, discrimination and patriarchal hegemony embedded in entrepreneurship.

A second moment of dissonance lies in our understanding of the possibilities opened by adopting an intersectional, hooksian orientation that considers the interplay between social positionality, structural and cultural power (Collins and Bilge, 2020), in an effort to address and “eliminate all oppressions” (Hooks, 1984, p. 36). Historically, feminist entrepreneurship scholarship has been stalled by “fixing women” to be more like men (Ahl, 2006; Marlow and McAdam, 2013; Steenblock and Sundermeier, 2025); a siloed focus on identity construction and the resistance strategies developed to navigate structural barriers and exclusion (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025), and even tactics designed to push women into entrepreneurship despite it being a gendered arena in which their success is continually constrained (Marlow, 2020). Thinking with the late Black feminist bell hooks' conception of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (1984) reveals how efforts to encourage more and greater women's entrepreneurial activities may sit in tension with the ways in which this interlocking macro-structural system of oppression has historically reproduced itself and continues to do so at hyperspeed via digital technologies and generative artificial intelligence (Ahl and Marlow, 2021).

A final discordant note emerges from the application of intersectionality and decoloniality to entrepreneurship studies, which engenders the question of what is being promoted when we, as feminists, seek to encourage equity across venture development. Pushing for a more integrative and systems-level approach to feminist research as a critical starting point leads directly to interrogation and critique of the power regimes embedded in capitalism and structural inequalities – not only patriarchy but also white supremacy, classism, heteronormativity and able-bodiedness and much more. As feminists make space for a reconceptualization of who and what constitutes an entrepreneur, it leads us to question the structures, particularly now in the period of late neoliberal digital capitalism, that position entrepreneurship itself as a social and economic good. Such dissonance produces a destabilisation that, as Harding suggests, has the potential to quickly escalate into challenges to “the most fundamental assumptions of modern, Western thought” – as she says, “no ‘normal science’ for us!” (1986: 648–9).

Praxis is a defining aspect of intersectional pursuits (Cho et al., 2013), integral to its Black feminist roots, such as those outlined by the activist Combahee River Collective (Combahee River Collective, 1977). A praxistical adoption of such dissonant positions means they cannot reside in the theoretical realm alone but need translation into everyday practice through reflexivity. Reflexivity is an ongoing practice of self-examination and reflection in light of feminism and the research process (Naples, 2013). From an intersectional perspective, such praxis encourages a deep reflexivity that centres relationality (Collins, 2019) – how processes of social identity and positionality shape and are shaped by the interconnections and power dynamics in our lives, work and institutions (Ruíz, 2017). This requires sustained yet dynamic internal work aimed at understanding oneself in relation to others within systems of racism, capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, colonialism and ablism, among other oppressive systems. For us, feminist praxis is a daily commitment to living feminist values, which as academics means engaging with and translating feminist knowledge and principles into action, while interrogating the impact and implications of one's own situated knowledge production (Haraway, 1988).

We can learn to unlearn the uncritical reproduction of structural oppression, inspired by intersectional activists, scholars and community organisers who creatively labour to resist and dismantle the systems that (re)produce and legitimate social inequalities. The contradictions between their efforts and the status quo present paradoxes that often bring deeper truths into relief. As Ahmed (2021) has argued in her work on institutional complaints, it is in attempts to resist or change the system that the way the system works to protect and reproduce itself is most clearly seen. Nonetheless, if enacting liberation through unlearning oppression is what we seek, we must see ourselves, our own academic institutions and research communities and their inherent contradictions as important catalysts and sites of generative potential. Higher education institutions have long been conceptualised as critical opportunities for intersectional praxis; yet, the overt social hierarchies that divide faculty, staff and students often prohibit feminist efforts and collaborations (Collins and Bilge, 2020).

Now more than ever, the neoliberal business school, which has long been critiqued for disseminating knowledge and practices deeply seeped in Western-centric neoliberal ideologies, racialised capitalism and the straight, white, male point of view (Dar et al., 2021; Abdallah, 2025), offers a vital canvas for intersectional and feminist conscious-raising and activities. As feminist stewards, power brokers and decision makers in its publication outlets and classrooms, where knowledge is produced and disseminated within a complex web of identity and power dynamics (Lazos Vargas, 2003), we must foment contradictions to bring about change. We can challenge our peers who refuse to acknowledge how their reproduction of mainstream business school assumptions has contributed to climate collapse and accelerated capitalist extraction (Parker, 2018). We can teach students how to examine their own identities and biases and to spot and challenge the oppressive systems that constitute and drive so much management and entrepreneurship dogma. We can do so while practicing and integrating our own sharpened viewpoints and expanded skillsets, role-modelling and learning from each other along the way. While this has long been necessary, we are now swimming against global currents of authoritarianism and fascism (Berger, 2025), accelerated by the digital economy and economy of genocide, wherein the genocidal effects of colonial endeavours are enabled by the international corporate sector (Albanese, 2025). Such interlocked and entangled forces threaten genuine academic freedom, while at the same time disguising themselves as the victims of its demise.

At this crucial threshold, we amplify a long-standing invitation to the feminist entrepreneurship community to consider intersectionality as method. This goes beyond engaging with intersectionality as a theoretical framework and requires the researcher to embrace an intersectional “stance” throughout the research process by examining the relationship between identity, relationality and structural inequalities and centring the lived experiences of Black, racialised and marginalised subjects at each research stage (MacKinnon, 2013). This approach includes not only the obvious steps related to data analysis and theory application but also the less obvious, such as the relationality of the research team and researcher-participant dynamics. This intersectional stance should extend to how knowledge is built upon and represented, including the politics of citation. Moreover, all intersectional projects must refuse to replicate the erasure of contributions of Black feminists, making sure to “Cite Black Women” (Smith et al., 2021): as a key Black feminist contribution, intersectionality should be credited and acknowledged as such. But, as Jennifer Nash argues, intersectionality is a product of, rather than synonymous with, Black feminism, with its own historical contingencies (Nash, 2011). Moreover, as we have argued elsewhere, we see it as a theoretical starting point, rather than endpoint, for studies of entrepreneurial inequality (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025). As such, we are curious about how engagement with the field of decolonial studies can further push feminist praxis to recognise and expose the coloniality of gender and the deep oppressions anchored in colonialism and capitalism.

While within the Global North and/or West where we are situated, we three authors all have clear differences in positionality, which we will explore in the section that follows. However, within a wider frame, we share a global North and/or West positionality, which introduces some hard limits to our understanding and comprehension of other knowledges and knowledge making. It also affords us particular racialised and linguistic privileges that support our ability to contribute to global discourses on feminisms, while maintaining the marginality and silencing of others, particularly non-English speakers. We recognise the challenge that decolonial and Indigenous scholarship poses to Western feminisms, including intersectionality and anti-racism and the unsettled, queered, contested terrain that emerges (Galindo, 2021; Mohanty, 2003; Smith, 2001; Spivak, 1988; Tallbear, 2013). Therefore, we take this editorial opportunity to emphasise the need for meaningful space for these debates, which are both long-standing and emergent. A contemporary and cutting-edge body of work highlights the presence, function and high-stakes consequences of anti-indigeneity and anti-Blackness in feminist knowledge production, including some decolonial work (Bailey Thomas, 2020; Garba and Sorentino, 2020; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Terrefe, 2020), debates which most feminist entrepreneurship scholarship has yet to engage.

If such debates are new and unfamiliar, as they will be to many, the best way to start is by listening, allowing “hearing racism to become praxis” (Swan, 2017: 549) and deepening reflexivity, both individually and in community, through the emotions of discomfort, guilt and shame that may arise when confronted with our own ignorance. Feminist praxis challenges patriarchal notions of scientific expertise by positioning ourselves as learners rather than experts (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025) in subjects that would naturally be opaque to us as a result of our positionalities. Adopting a learner – or indeed, unlearner – orientation enables us to stay both critically attuned and open to the insights from marginalised alternative worldviews. Such ontologies can challenge all we understand and believe the world to be; as such, they hold the potential to transform our fundamental assumptions and thus our scholarly praxis.

We invoke the notions of intersectionality and decoloniality in parallel here to emphasise how both could be brought into conversation with feminist entrepreneurship scholarship and praxis to advance the field. Emerging from their own geographical, socio-legal, political and historical contexts, they are conceptually and methodologically quite different and cannot necessarily be equated; instead, we suggest they can both be drawn upon to inform feminist scholarly praxis and that, where relevant, the tensions between them generatively explored. Importantly, what they share is the validation of previously marginalised experiences and ways of knowing, which feminist scholarship requires for its continued relevance. Since, at this stage, intersectionality is more familiar to our field, we position it as a threshold concept, over which an embeddedness in critical race theory enhances its explanatory power (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025). However, we note its widespread uptake and extensive empirical application was heavily dependent upon a problematic decoupling from its roots in Black women's politics, via white feminism's notion of womanhood being always – already – constructed as white (Christofferson and Emejulu, 2022).

Decoloniality, in contrast, could be characterised as a horizon for our field, since to grapple with it honestly means engaging with a vast number of diverse thinkers and social movements spanning formerly colonised geographies, including Indigenous scholarship, methodologies and resistance. Its glue is a broad political goal of liberating thought, praxis and oppressed people from the constraints of centuries of Western imperial (neo)colonialist regimes – epistemic, economic and otherwise. A broadly functionalist, predominantly capitalist field like entrepreneurship studies seems less likely to embrace this goal; as such, we do not expect decolonial approaches to receive the same warm welcome as intersectionality. Nonetheless, platforming and resourcing the revitalisation and generation of alternative ontologies and knowledge traditions is a decolonial orientation that can prompt the unlearning so essential to this historical moment. In tandem and in conversation, we suggest the two concepts have the potential to push feminist entrepreneurship scholarship to its critical, cutting edges.

With urgency, we ask you, as readers, the question we asked ourselves when collectively imagining and shaping this editorial: How can we transform ourselves, journals, conferences and classrooms into sites of feminist consciousness-raising and advance an intersectional, anti-racist decoloniality? We begin to respond with individual autoethnographic explorations into how the process of transformation began – and continues – for each of us in the development of our own feminist consciousnesses as researchers. In so doing, we use autoethnography as a method via which to practice the feminist critical reflexivity of which we speak (England, 1994; Hooks, 1994; Martinez Dy, 2021). Autoethnography aligns with feminist scholarship on the connections between the personal and political by writing from and about subjective personal experience in order to examine, in this case, the formation of beliefs (Scott, 2022). Using the autoethnographic convention of the vignette, we share snapshots of the personal stories that we believe offer insights into our experiences of becoming feminist entrepreneurship scholars, from initial sparks of feminist curiosity to doing intersectional research, plus the continuous (un)learning this asks of us. Our aims here are to, first, illuminate how we came to understand feminism and intersectionality and, second, model how it has motivated our scholarly contributions and transformed our comprehension of how the phenomena of social difference, inequality and entrepreneurship interoperate, opening for us deeper more expansive and more radical pathways of knowledge and practice.

Susan: With encouragement and family help, as a young divorced single parent who left school at 16 and then worked her way around Europe, got married and/or divorced and had a child, I returned to the UK in the 1980s to progress my disrupted education eventually gaining a degree in sociology at the University of Warwick. Most of my student peers were younger, wealthier and far more confident than I given my working-class roots; they were secure in their right to be at Warwick and none had a four-year-old son. Yet, those circumstances brought sociology to life for me; I was living class differentiation and also, gendered caring roles with family support – for me, that theory came to life in my daily experiences – I did not know, of course, that I could have called that praxis!

Happily, there is nothing like imposter syndrome to motivate achievement; thus, on the basis of the outcomes of my first degree, I was awarded an ESRC (UK. Economic and Social Research Council) scholarship for post graduate study in industrial relations. However, I also needed a part-time job to supplement my grant. I undertook several short-term projects for the business school and, on the basis of those networks, found a part-time research associate post in the newly formed Centre for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises headed by the late David Storey. I knew nothing about small firms and cared even less, but it was a job. Whilst David and his team pursued a research agenda evaluating the socio-economic contribution of self-employment to wealth and job creation, with my role being to interview SME owners and analyse data, there was also a strong focus on business creation programmes in the centre. These were managed by a cohort of white middle-aged men in grey suits each of whom had a secretary to tend to their every need. With regard to the research activity and the business advisory arm, the whole environment was steeped in male privilege and authority. It was at that time I realised the extent to which I had adopted a sociological mindset during my degrees, which, as Berger (1973) memorably claimed in his classic text, gave me “a way of seeing” of which I had no awareness until joining the CSME; it made me appreciate the value and richness of my “sociological imagination” (Wright-Mills, 1959), which gave voice to my critical focus on the patriarchal context in which I suddenly found myself. If further evidence was required, assumptions that as the girl, during any meetings or interviews, it was always my role to make the tea, which caused further critical reflection and considerable irritation.

During the 1990s, however, as the small firm debate (entrepreneurship had not quite made it over the UK at this point) was growing in scope, greater recognition was afforded to heterogeneity in the sector. Colleagues such as Monder Ram were drawing attention to the influence of race and ethnicity upon the propensity for self-employment. Indeed, my first publication was based upon research from a project exploring the training needs of ethnic minority entrepreneurs; in that era, it was deemed a novel perspective, which, but needless to say, only acknowledged men. Regarding gender issues, these were just not recognised; feminist or gender-informed debate, well established across disciplines at this time, had been effectively ignored in the small firm research field. There was a mindset at the time that women were of no consequence when exploring the role and value of self-employment. I remember finding this astonishing and voiced my concerns to the point of trying to incorporate the issue into emerging work at the centre – this led to me being excluded from an author team when I pursued a gendered issue of fairness and inclusion related to the study in question. Taking the moral high ground, I stated that if the issue was not acknowledged, I did not wish to be listed as an author, which was rapidly solved by removing me! Such is the loneliness of the moral high ground.

On a more positive note, having left Warwick with a sociological perspective and a critical view of SME studies, I was able to contribute to the emerging debate on gender, women and entrepreneurship as a growing number of voices in the UK, Europe and the USA raised the profile of what was then termed “female entrepreneurship”. As a small gesture of appeasement, several leading conferences even went as far as to have separate tracks on “female entrepreneurship”, although I distinctly remember, in the early days at ISBE, the room was always the smallest and furthest away as the conference organiser of the time had no time for such nonsense. As Holmquist and Sundin (1989) so rightly claimed of this era, “entrepreneurship was for men, about men and by men”; in the 1990s, we were still having lively arguments with (male) colleagues that “gender was just a variable” there to be counted. Of course, as many of us pointed out, sex is a variable, and gender is an ascription – the former can be counted, and the latter has to be analysed and explained – that is the point. To illustrate this argument, some nascent feminist critiques also emerged in these early years, including my own (Mirchandani, 1999; Marlow, 2002).

During the 1990s and into the 2000s, studying women's entrepreneurship came to be an accepted element of the entrepreneurial discourse and a key element of government policy on a global basis. Since then, female entrepreneurs have morphed into women business owners, appearing slightly less like laboratory specimens; gender has been incorporated in many aspects of the entrepreneurial discourse, and diverse feminist analyses have emerged as explanatory constructs. The marginal field of “female entrepreneurship”, originally marginalised and derided as niche and a minority activity, has been transformed into a rich and sophisticated body of gendered critique and scholarship, which has continued to evolve in terms of reflexive debate and conceptual capture.

Pausing to reflect upon this progress, contemporary iterations have flourished whilst also engaging with a broader range of debate, which acknowledges the very narrow focus of the initial field – that gender means female, whiteness was normative, class meaningless and context was an advanced economy. These notions are being debunked; so, for example, the critical role of intersectionality and positionality has been recognised as pivotal for future progress (Martinez Dy et al., 2014; Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025); whilst heteronormative critiques (Rumens, 2025) and postfeminist analyses (Ahl and Marlow, 2021) broaden the scope, challenging the established Western advanced economy bias is deemed essential (Al Dajani, 2022). These are just a very few indicators of emergent diversity and growing sophistication. My colleagues, Angela and Heatherjean, identify further complex critical analyses in their reflections below, which denote the progress we have made building a varied but challenging theoretical framework for our field, illustrated by compelling empirical evidence. This progress is rooted in those formative arguments that emerged in the 1990s with differentiated threads, critical reflections and new pathways emerging but bound by a common passion.

I have been privileged to be part of this evolution engaging with a wonderful, talented and supportive global community of gifted scholars who have acted tirelessly to establish the field of gender and self-employment as central to the entrepreneurship discipline. Many of these colleagues are now promoting its evolution into intersectionality, race and minority critiques, challenging heteronormativity and many other avenues for progress. Thus, the next generation of researchers, some of whom it has been my great joy to work with, are now developing the debate further in exciting and varied directions in order to advance current theorising and scholarly praxis. Given the richness and promise of our community of practice, we can look forward with anticipation to a thought provoking, challenging and reflexive future. I think we can safely say we have debunked those original critical voices as simplistic, biased and embedded in narrow patriarchal ways of seeing; happily, we have moved well beyond the notion that “gender is just a variable”, so not worth the effort!

Angela: Intersectionality was a fundamental part of my feminist and anti-racist consciousness-raising. Both in school and as part of an artist-activist community in Seattle, Washington, I explored my identity, history of coloniality and commonalities of diasporic experience as a young Filipina American – I was lucky to have high school teachers of colour who cared that their students had access to their cultural histories. I was one of the first cohorts in a newly created history module focused on racially minoritised groups in the USA. I was also the youngest member of the isangmahal arts kollective, a Filipinx-American collective that created new spaces for self-expression by and for people of colour and those of mixed heritage. isangmahal was inspired by Black and Brown liberation movements, Black feminist cultural criticism and empowerment of racially minoritised people through the arts, especially hip-hop and poetry. During my undergraduate degree, feminist educators of colour helped me to understand how Asian women are positioned in white supremacist contexts and the barriers we face, such as colourism, hypersexualisation and assumptions of cis-heteronormativity, submissiveness and silence. Intersectionality was a cornerstone concept to these analyses, inspiring a body of poetic work that I published through grassroots channels like open mics, slams, chapbooks and underground hip-hop. Although I had rarely read original texts, I tacitly understood the way intersectionality made visible the confluence of structural forces at work in shaping how women of colour were seen by the white gaze and the effect this had on one's life chances.

Fast forward to my MSc degree in 2009–2010, as a pre-career researcher, I knew enough to include both “gender” and “ethnicity” as variables in my positivistic-by-default, mixed methods dissertation, but not enough to explore their interaction, address race or do more than use them as controls. As a doctoral researcher from 2011, however, I had more time and space to be intentional about my approach. I brought intersectionality theory to my supervisors, including Sue, a co-author of this editorial, who were not only supportive but also encouraging of my use of this literature and saw its potential for contribution. I was also able to dive deeply into the original texts and the field of study they had seeded.

To build my study's methodological base, I followed the stream of literature that acknowledged the contributions of intersectional theory but critiqued its ontological shortcomings, developing and publishing methodological work on a critical realist intersectional ontology (Martinez Dy et al., 2014). I applied intersectionality to a study of entrepreneurial inequality by intentionally seeking a racially diverse sample of women for my Ph.D. on UK women's digital enterprise and explored the differences that race, gender and class, in concert, made to their entrepreneurial activities (Martinez Dy et al., 2014). In 2017, I met other women business and management scholars of colour who emboldened me as an anti-racist feminist researcher and introduced me to contemporary anti-racist and decolonial scholarship (Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Tate and Page, 2018). With them, I co-founded the Decolonizing Alliance, an international group of business and management scholars critical of the white supremacy and Anglo-Eurocentric aspects of our field, and Building the Anti-Racist Classroom (2018–2022), a scholar-activist collective developing and implementing anti-racist pedagogy and practice for UK higher education, vehicles through which we collectively honed our anti-racist feminist praxes.

During the COVID-incubated, international cultural rupture against racism of 2020, vast numbers of resources were shared, and previously marginalised discourses amplified through social media. I was called upon as an anti-racism leader in my institution (Martinez Dy, 2021), a role better understood when informed by queer feminisms of colour (Ahmed, 2012, 2021). To ground my learning, I entered into serious study of the notion of racial capitalism and its divisive and extractivist logics and the techno-carcerality tackled by abolitionist techno-feminism and transformative justice movements (Benjamin, 2019; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Kaba, 2021; Robinson, 2000). Slowly, I began to see myself as part of a critical (techno)cultural studies tradition (e.g. Benjamin, 2016; Hall, 2016; Noble and Tynes, 2016). I engaged with other intersectionality scholars through dedicated conferences, learned more about anti-Blackness (Nkomo, 2021) from activists and scholars building on the work of Afropessimist and Afrofuturist thought leaders (brown, 2017, 2019; Harney and Moten, 2013; Wilderson, 2010), refined my critical realist perspective on intersectional positionality and sharpened my politics of citation in the process (Craven, 2021; Smith et al., 2021). What emerged was a sense of wonder at the truth, clarity and incisiveness of what I encountered, as well as gratitude for the models of liberation embedded in Black, Indigenous and queer resistance to oppression. Alongside this emerged a more critical view of my previous efforts: I began to see the anti-Blackness at work in the range of critiques, including my own, levelled at intersectionality (Martinez Dy et al., 2014). Beyond my grounding in intersectionality theory, I encountered anti-racism, decoloniality, the Black radical tradition and radical collectivity (Brewis et al., 2020; Craven, 2021). These vast and energising literature spoke to my own history as part of social movements and are motivating my current thinking and shaping my scholar-activist praxis; as I have written previously in this journal (Martinez Dy, 2021), I now see them as vital ingredients in my – and indeed any – lifelong, anti-racist (techno)feminist, intellectual and political project.

HeatherJean: As an early career scholar, intersectionality became my vehicle with which to pursue feminist, anti-racist and reflexive research – an imperative for our field. As a long-time feminist and social activist, I was introduced to intersectionality's field-based applications in social and political movements as a teenager, guided and role-modelled by foster parents who are relentless social justice activists. It was an important lens for my own identity explorations and reckonings that were occurring for me at the time as a teenager living apart from her biological mother. Many years later at the start of my doctoral studies, I returned to it as a formal theoretical and feminist framework to examine entrepreneuring in the newly legal recreational marijuana market in Massachusetts. In my study of feminist and critical theories, intersectionality seemed most applicable to an investigation of identity, power and entrepreneurial activity in the cannabis context. As an emerging industry, the legal cannabis market has garnered significant media attention for its unique and complex market challenges, resulting from an archaic classification as a federal Schedule I drug (Lashley and Pollock, 2020). However, what interests me most about this industry is whether it will emerge in a way that offers restorative justice for its deeply racist and sexist history (Dufton, 2017), and, if so, how. Marijuana has been used as a lever of oppression and incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans for decades (Bender, 2016), while the role of women in the cannabis trade has essentially disappeared (Carey, 2014). My approach to this research context was motivated by questions such as: How does social identity shape the experience of new majority founders, and how are their identities shaping the industry? How is historical and present-day racism and sexism showing up in the broader structures and procedures of achieving coveted cannabis licensure? How is my own social identity and positioning influencing my research approach and how I show up in cannabis spaces? Amidst these points of inquiry, intersectionality provided me with not only a dynamic framework to examine the barriers of entry for new majority entrepreneurs in a growth market but also a multi-level, multi-dimensional, reflexive research process to examine the complex and interrelated relationship between early-stage entrepreneurship, historical context and identity (including my own).

What ultimately emerged from my fieldwork, which included participant observation and interviews, was the alienation and othering of new majority founders in this emerging market context, simultaneously caused by challenges born from opaque regulations; a historically racist real estate market and wealth gap (Ozkazanc-Pan and Muntean, 2021); unattainable capital requirements; homogenous, masculinised structures (Ahl, 2006) and dominant white spaces and norms common to entrepreneurship (Wingfield, 2008). This work begins to scratch the surface of the cumulative, compounded disadvantages that result from the exclusive business practices and dominant norms commonplace to early-stage entrepreneurship. However, despite this patriarchal and institutionally racist gatekeeping, many study participants reconceptualised their entrepreneurship as activism and were driven by their motivations to build an inclusive growth industry that acknowledges marijuana's oppressive history (MacNeil, 2022). In my work, I saw how intersectionality offers entrepreneurship studies an opportunity to scrutinise the social, financial and cultural capital practices that are often investigated in isolation from each other. In crossing the threshold, you commit to bringing social identity, power and historical and social context to the forefront, rather than the backdrop, of the research process. Holding space for and investigating these elements simultaneously has the potential to create a clearing for critical knowledge production and alternative discourses that are deeply needed to disrupt outdated notions of meritocracy and perceptions of homogeneity in entrepreneurial activity.

Feminist reflexive identity work has also had a lasting impact on me. What first drew me to the cannabis industry as a research context was the media's promise that it would be the first billion-dollar market dominated by women (Dockertman, 2015; Lidz, 2015). But during my fieldwork, I reflected more deeply on the toxic masculinity of the underground cannabis market, which infiltrated and haunted my own personal story and childhood. My history in the cannabis world, as well as biased experiences as a female founder, connected me with my participants, enabling my access to cannabis spaces and networks. In my conversations with Black and Brown founders, I also reflected on the privileges that I experienced throughout my entrepreneurial journey, such as access to networks likely due to my race and cultural capital. Moreover, in my later stages of research and writing, I grappled with my own whiteness and positionality as the pandemic and social movements of 2020 raged. Quarantined at home with three young children, I pushed through the writing, all the while hyper-aware of the unjust divide between knowledge economy workers, sheltered inside our homes, and those on the front lines, fuelling the social reproduction of hospitals and grocery stores. My identity work became part of the research. It was during this time that I discovered that my teenage mother was shunned and forced to drop out of high school during her pregnancy with me. Her story, and the stories of my study participants, emboldened me to finish writing, all the while nursing and caring for my new-born and twin toddlers. What I discovered through my intersectional research project was an opportunity to remove the silos separating my commitment to social justice and anti-racism, academic pursuits and social identity, discovering the vital and influential relationship between them. This identity work will show up differently for everyone, but in such stark periods of inequality, an important part of the work is discovering our own identities in the process to better understand our role in both creating and combating inequalities, and ideally, to fuel our activism.

From three separate vantage points, these vignettes illustrate how we have evolved as researchers through differing routes but share a desire to use our feminist commitment and principles to challenge assumptions and values that were, and many still are, taken for granted. As we argue, reflexive feminist praxis requires the advocate to not only understand inequity, through conceptual sense-making but also to enact such sensemaking as a mode of change. Challenge, disruption and change are critical routes to enable this, but these routes are made effective and possible through shared values, communities and dialectic debate, which in turn enable action. Through these vignettes, we see different experiences: the challenges raised by Marlow were narrowly focused on gender issues blinkered by advanced economy priorities, but this was a necessary first step. Working with many other colleagues of the time, arguing and advocating for the value and impact of gendered ascriptions as an exclusionary discourse, was necessary to enact change to prevailing power relations. Bringing women as subjects to the debate worked to reveal the paucity of the prevailing discourse. Drawing upon feminist debates to inform actions challenging gender blindness and deep-seated bias laid the initial building blocks to open a wider narrative. Next, as Martinez Dy demonstrates in her vignette, whilst gender was a key issue, it offered only a partial explanation. As an immigrant woman of colour and daughter of immigrants whose lived experiences were made comprehensible by intersectionality, Martinez Dy brought this framework to her feminist approach. She did not stop there but drew on critical race scholarship to contextualise, critique and deepen her understanding of intersectionality, which opened the door to her emerging engagement with decolonial scholarship. Finally, in engaging with intersectionality in her early scholarly journey, MacNeil shares how she eliminated silos between her activism, research and personal identity work in her exploration of the cannabis industry, which fuelled her personal and scholarly sense-making processes during the painful turbulence of the pandemic. Across the threshold, intersectionality enabled scaffolding for not only scholarly work but also lasting personal identity work that further informs her praxis. She highlights how “doing intersectionality” requires us to interrogate embedded power structures and deeply held biases that plague our research contexts, while personally challenging us to reckon with our positionality within these spheres to better understand and evolve our own anti-racist and feminist efforts.

In this editorial, we have endeavoured to urge feminist entrepreneurship studies to stretch not only within theory but also to praxis. As scholars, such praxis is heavily centred upon research and pedagogy, while some may also choose to engage in feminist scholar-activism within and beyond the academy. We invite feminist entrepreneurship scholars to deepen and complicate simplistic, single-axis notions of feminism and, moreover, to do the same for superficial notions of intersectionality. Our own personal praxes are leading us to explore and unpack whatever sits at our personal feminist growth edges, whether that is intersectionality, anti-racism, queer feminism and/or decoloniality, in theory and action, as well as studying the nuance, tensions and generative contradictions within each of these critical and discerning, but vital and vibrant, fields. While we cannot expect that others' journeys will be like ours, we believe it is worth noting that the truth of intersectionality in particular became visible to us through our experiences of trying to change power relationships in society. With this renewed understanding of the social world, we were better equipped to spot inequalities and work with others to address them. It is thus clear to us that intersectionality is an obvious conceptual partner to social justice activism and central to a meaningfully inclusive feminist praxis. It enables a view of the terrain that spotlights the most marginalised and vulnerable and clearly identifies the racialised and intersectional relations of power and violence therein (Gilmore, 2002; Benjamin, 2016).

From such scholarship and activism, which informs a recent wave of publications on marginalised and excluded entrepreneurial activity, combined with our own reflexive practice, we can continually unlearn the hegemonic norms of the field. Such norms are problematic for the ways in which they draw and maintain attention to those who most successfully reproduce its dominant practices, and rather than critiquing or challenging these outcomes, we are asked to predict ways that traditionally excluded groups might see such success within their reach. While we of course believe that access and opportunity must be more equally accessible, our approaches to feminism and intersectionality are in close conversation with creative social justice movements that seek not to gain access to nor minimally reform broken systems, but from whatever vantage point we occupy, to challenge the fundamental structures upon which such systems are built – interrogating the power hierarchies, decision-making and resource distribution practices, while at the same time exercising radical imagination regarding how knowledge production could be done differently.

Chilean feminist and organisation studies scholar-activist Marcela Mandiola (2019) reminds us that to organise differently, we must first understand how we are currently organised. This entails critical reflexivity within the sector that begins with personal reflection and extends to reflective analysis of our research histories, relationships with participants and partners and things we would do differently. The sector in general, feminists within it especially, must ask: What must change for these differences to be possible? Consideration is needed of the whole research life cycle, from funder requirements that have never been fit for purpose, to the effects our personalities and positionalities have on the process; from the extractive relationships with those whom we research – who offer data for our papers and are then abandoned – to the often fraught and resource-driven, power-laden relationships with academic publishers and industry organisations that deliver our conference spaces (Decolonizing Alliance, 2019; Jack, 2024); the Ph.D. students we encourage forward while supporting through struggles and warning them of what lies ahead; the burnout that punctuates our lives as feminist researchers working to change the system while embedded within it and the way that the “messiness” (Clark et al., 2007) of research behind the scenes is cleaned up in writing to become presentable for publications, with the result that true reflexivity is never legitimised as part of the research process. Considering all this, why is feminist exhaustion (Nash and Pinto, 2024) not as justifiable of a reason for finishing data collection as data saturation? Can we create space for articulating the actual way we arrived at our conclusions and practice not only writing but also – once we get there – reviewing and editing differently (Gilmore et al., 2019)?

We see such possibilities emergent in the notions of feminism, and especially, intersectionality as method. The vignettes we present here, describing how we arrived at our feminist orientations via our positionalities, model ways that we might introduce more explicit reflexivity into research in entrepreneurship and gender, which, while now more intersectionally aware, still predominantly presents itself as objective in order to be taken seriously within its historically quasi-scientific patriarchally dominated field. However, both feminist and decolonial scholarship challenge the notion that objectivity is possible, asserting instead that knowledge is situated within subjectivity, which is itself tied to positionality. Thus, we encourage such reflexive writing, both individually and with others, as a useful exercise, a compass for situating oneself in one's own work and can become a standard practice – whether remaining private or made public – in the research process. While we hesitate to recommend yet another requirement for the already demanding research process, we believe incorporating such reflexivity as a regular part of the “doing” of research and encouraging it as editors and other spaces in which we act as decision makers, can continue and extend our feminist commitments (England, 1994). We thank Diana Hechevarria and the IGJE's previous editors for the opportunity to experiment with this format, both now and previously (Marlow, 2020; Martinez Dy, 2021).

Further expanding on urgent aspects of feminist academic praxis, we believe that engaging with intersectionality and those concepts that we frame as sitting over its threshold are critical to advancing feminist pedagogy (Martinez Dy and MacNeil, 2025), expanding student horizons in a way that can be supportive in such challenging and fraught geopolitical times. As entrepreneurship scholars, our work sits at the very centre of the Venn diagrams of racial capitalism and imperialist coloniality, patriarchy, neoliberalism and their reproduction and transformation through innovation into the era of the digital economy. This “belly of the beast” positioning leads to a paradoxical pedagogical stance: while we encourage critical thinking in our students, we may discourage it in ourselves and our peers, for whom critical entrepreneurship studies is but another niche literature stream that rarely disrupts the field's mainstream dialogue (Marlow and Martinez Dy, 2018). However, as educators and doctoral research supervisors, we can call attention, as this journal does, to the relevance of inequality to the study of entrepreneurship and shed a new light. Rather than seeing asymmetry of information and resources as something to exploit, in the manner of strategic entrepreneurship literature, we can see it as the outcome of social, economic and political inequalities that enable select individuals and groups to accelerate processes of capital accumulation (Jones and Murtola, 2012).

In teaching Schumpeterian notions of creative destruction by heroic entrepreneurs, we can recall that Schumpeter's work was in direct dialogue with that of Marx (Elliot, 1980) and introduce Marx's labour theory of value (Fuchs, 2014; Marx, 1976). Building on this, we can introduce other theories of value (Elder-Vass, 2022; Federici, 2019) along with the contemporary understanding of capitalism as racialised (Bhattacharyya, 2018). In response to the field's acknowledgement of a need to attend to context (Welter, 2011), we can introduce the historical conditions that have produced the myriad inequalities we observe. Finally, it is important that the learning environments we create enable students of all backgrounds and intersectional identities to reflect on their personal stories, express themselves and engage in principled and supported debate, which is possible only through careful and intentional space creation, building on an intersectional feminist sensibility (Building the Anti-Racist Classroom, 2021).

In closing, we return to the notion of praxis that has motivated much of this editorial. For us, praxis is a daily lived engagement with the theories that animate our thinking and prompt us to live in accordance with our values. In this age of digital automation and large language models, one way of doing so is to challenge our academic socialisation as passive repositories of knowledge attempting to fill gaps and edge the field forward. Instead, we can make epistemic leaps through paying more attention to the deep unlearning of the ways in which we have been taught to conform to systems that marginalise and undermine us. Within this learning-unlearning tension, we see the Kuhnian fundamental insight evident in paradigmatic shifts in every discipline – that in order to substantially advance a field, we must be willing to dismantle some of its most dominant assumptions. Feminist approaches have the potential to forge a new kind of entrepreneurship scholarship that focuses on the world-building not of the histories of empire that have characterised much of our debate to date but those visions for the world that are needed now, which we can encourage our field to imagine and spur our students to bring into being.

In this article, we have reflected upon how feminist critiques have been used as an anchoring construct to, initially, analyse the influence of gender upon women's entrepreneurial activities. We then analysed how this debate has evolved in terms of complexity, scope and coverage to move beyond this narrow focus on specific women to the exclusion of those with more marginalised embodiments and positionalities. Using personal vignettes as illustrative lenses, we reflected upon our own experiences of feminist praxis, which continually prompt the expansion of our perspectives and political commitments, as well as new research and pedagogical approaches. To complete this circle, we hope the issues raised in this editorial and the personal insights shared will encourage readers to pause and reflect upon their own positionalities. We can seek opportunities to “unlearn” embedded academic assumptions and engage more widely with historically marginalised feminisms, even as they disrupt what have become comfortable and comprehensible ways of doing and being. The roots, and routes, of feminist praxis must be disruptive and can only be so if we reflectively take responsibility to be disruptors through our own actions and work. May we continue to build feminist scholarly solidarity as we forge these new pathways together.