Salient Circles Diagrams: Making Intersectional Identities, Privilege, Power, and Marginalization Visible

Abstract The Salient Circles Diagram is a teaching exercise designed to help participants visually display the relative importance and intersections of their most personally salient identities (e.g., identity as a woman or as a person of color). This activity has been used with hundreds of participants in undergraduate and graduate classes and training programs, continuing education events with psychology professionals, and diversity trainings with non-psychology professionals. Group discussion of the diagrams creates space for dialogue about why some identities are salient and some may be invisible, systems of privilege, power, and marginalization, and how cultural, structural, and individual factors sustain them.