Till Örebro universitet

This book symposium is a multilogue on four books Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi: The Pressure of Being a Man in an African City, by Mario Schmidt; City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport, by Romit Chowdhury; Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony, by Shannon Philip; and A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism, by Jordanna C. Matlon. The discussion, held between the four authors, along with Jeff Hearn and Kopano Ratele, addresses: the background to the books based in Kenya, India and C & ocirc;te d'Ivoire respectively; main contributions around men, masculinities and urbanism; ethnography and other methodologies; relations to Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities, Feminist and Human Geography, and kindred disciplines, and ways forward.

Contemporary ageing policy often constructs demographic change as a challenge requiring urgent intervention. While ageing is not seen as a problem per se, in policy debate it is often presented as a crisis. Consequently, countries and institutions have sought to identify solutions to the represented problem. A common policy response in Western nations has been to focus on individual activity as a solution. The implications of such developments are, however, seldom explicitly discussed. This article focuses on Finland, a country often positioned as a Nordic welfare state. Using the post-structuralist approach 'What's the Problem Represented to Be' (WPR), it examines problems of and solutions to changing demographics represented in Finnish policy, highlighting the implications for older adults and their care. From an analysis of 42 governmental policy and related documents (2002-2024), 11 documents (2008-2024) were selected for detailed examination concerning the health and social care of older adults. The analysis shows that the predominant responsibility for care of older adults is laid on older adults themselves, their family members and peers, while the responsibility of the state is largely silenced. The article highlights the wider analytical, policy and practice implications of neo-liberal ageing policy and discusses how older adults are governed through policy in the midst of the absent interaction between policy, conceptual debates and everyday life material realities through a three-level conceptual model. This absence is not merely a gap but a mode of governance that reflects broader neo-liberal shifts in welfare policy.

This paper presents a critical analysis of the links between modernization and masculinities in Türkiye through the case of the regulation of men’s hair in the civil service. The Turkish civil service is an institution where the state has accumulated and deployed power, disciplined its civil servant employees, and shaped and transformed masculinities as part of the broader process of modernization. Both the civil service as a research field, and men’s hair, despite its powerful symbolic importance in politics, have been neglected in critical studies on men and masculinities. To fill this gap, four momentous changes in civil service history in Türkiye are examined, as a part of the modernization project over the last two centuries and simultaneous reciprocal interrelations of macro- and meso-processes with men’s facial hair. These changes have been targeted towards or resulted in transformations of men’s facial hair in the civil service, in turn constructing state-sanctioned masculinities in the civil service and society.

Developments in digital technologies might provide limitless ways to reshape humanity's very existence, but also open up what we term "bounded limitless" opportunities for digital gender-sexual violations (DGSV). That is, "limitless" opportunities for men to sexually violate women within the inherent "boundedness" of digital technological infrastructures and architectures. Building on the existing interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, we explore the gendered disbenefits, specifically some of the ways in which digital technologies provide men with "bounded limitless" opportunities to perpetrate DGSV in physical and virtual times and spaces, and the implications for women, their bodies, and gender-sexual relations more broadly.

The concept of care, like that of work, is very broad and multifaceted. It can refer to many different forms of care: physical, psychological, social and spiritual. Care can also refer to organized systems of care, for example health care, social care, institutional care and home care. Care can be conceptualized both as work, in terms of care work conducted, and as more than work alone, as in care for others, one’s or others’ children and other dependents, as well as for oneself. According to Tronto (2013), care can entail: caring about; taking care of; giving care; receiving care; caring with, as with solidarity. Care can thus be used more widely still to refer to care for animals, non-humans, the environment and the planet.

Men have historically dominated the written word, in academia, research, science, histories, literature, religion and many further arenas. Often, this domination has taken the shape of men writing about men, and for men, generally implicitly so. In contrast, this chapter focuses on critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM) and the ‘absence presence’ of men and masculinities within systems and relations of gender power and domination, drawing on the full range of feminist and critical gender and sexuality scholarship. The chapter examines some of the enduring theoretical debates in and around CSMM, focusing on naming and deconstruction; power, domination, hegemony and risk-taking and socially problematic practices. The chapter continues by examining institutionalization processes: the making, reproduction and change in more durable academic activities, structures and interventions of CSMM. These include study groups, research groups, teaching, research and publication. The concluding discussion addresses current divergences and challenges in and around CSMM, in geopolitics; individual and group political and ethical positioning and empirical and theoretical content.

David L. Collinson is a UK-based scholar of gender, organizations and management, with a special interest in leadership. Collinson can rightly claim to be amongst a small number of top-flight European scholars in his field. His range of work on critical approaches to leadership, management and organization is vast and variegated, with primary interests in: leadership and followership dialectics; power, identities and insecurities; gender, men and masculinities; conformity, dramaturgy and resistance; humour in organizations; and positivity and Prozac leadership. In particular, he has focused much of his academic work on two related subject areas, leadership, and gender, men and masculinities, thus bridging Critical Leadership Studies (CLS) and Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities (CSMM). 

Studies on men, boys, and masculinities, critical and feminist or otherwise, have been dominated by the Global North, and especially Anglophone, West-centric, scholarship. In this dialogical chapter, we build on our own earlier collaborative work to examine the contribution of, and challenges and blocks to, furthering decolonising studies on men, boys, and masculinities – both within the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South,’ and from ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ positionalities and perspectives. A vibrant, Southern/non-Global North and non-Anglophone range of scholarship on men, boys, and masculinities now exists, with which we seek to engage. Alongside, in conversation with, and often against the West-centricity of the studies on masculinities, boys, and men, there is an emerging set of studies, literatures, and guidances on decolonial approaches to men, boys, and masculinities that we also engage in our dialogue. We consider the implications of these bodies of scholarly work. We end with an epigraph of some relevant literature.

This entry addresses sexuality education about the intersection of sexuality and gendered violence, with a focus on men’s violence against women which is the dominant pattern of interpersonal violence. The field of anti-violence work by both activists and official agents (such as criminal justice systems, education systems, and public health) is vast. Here we are concerned with two aspects: anti-violence work conducted via social marketing campaigns, as a form of public education; and the growing problem of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSV) (Hall et al., 2023). DGSV refers to the use, typically but not only, by men and boys of digital technologies to perpetrate gender-based violence (GBV) and so violate known and/or unknown victim-survivors, typically, but not only, women and girls. DGSV has major negative effects on the health, well-being and freedom of victim-survivors, and accordingly, we use the same term ‘perpetrators’ for those who perpetrate DGSV, as is used for those who perpetrate offline physical, sexual and related violences. DGSV amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual people is also a significant issue (see Dietzel, 2021) that warrants further examination but is beyond the remit of this paper. 

The digital age requires people of all ages to communicate and organise their lives through digital technologies. The project EQualCare (“Alone but connected? Digital (in)equalities in care work and generational relationships among older people living alone”) investigated how the growing population of older people living alone is man-aging this transition, how it shapes their (non-)digital social networks and what changes on local, regional, national and international levels need to be brought about to ensure (digital) equality. This white paper gives insight into the multi-method work that was done, summarises key findings, and provides recommendations for policy and practice.

EQualCare was a cross-cultural comparison and collaboration across Finland, Ger-many, Latvia and Sweden, with Finland and Sweden as two countries advanced in the digitalisation of civic and private life and thus providing a helpful contrast to Germany and Latvia that are at different levels of digitalisation. Their joint work comprised of four parts: 

• To begin with all four national researcher teams conducted respective critical document analyses of social policy documents and legislation, examining how ageing, living alone, digitalisation, and care-responsibilities are portrayed in the national policy documents. 

• Following, an analyses of existing national and EU data sets on ageing took place to draw comparative information on living conditions, income, health, use of dig-ital devices, and care work across the four countries. 

• The central part of EQualCare entailed a participatory action research (PAR) project that was conducted across the four countries and involved older people as co-researchers in nine local project teams. 

• The model of EQualCare was a participatory policy making one, whereby the work of one of the PAR projects was connected with the others, with the findings from the policy analyses and statistical analyses providing the backdrop and scaf-folding to develop the recommendations.

The project team was strongly multidisciplinary; bring together experienced re-searchers in anthropology, business organisation and management studies, cultural studies, education, gender studies, psychology, social psychology, social work and sociology.