To Örebro University

Questions of social, economic, institutional and environmental sustainability have often been addressed without giving strong attention to intersectional gender power relations. And even when they have been addressed in relation to intersectional gender power relations, critical interrogations of men and masculinities have not so often been highlighted. In this session, I reflect critically on the long-term development of the work of a transnational group of researchers from across 15+ countries, originally based within the GEXcel (Linköping-Örebro) centre of excellence, Sweden. Following the earlier collection, Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and Within Nations (Hearn, Blagojević and Harrison, 2013), this collective, at times dispersed, work has led onto the new collection, The Unsustainable Institutions of Men: Transnational Dispersed Centres, Gender Power, Contradictions(Hearn, Vasquez del Aquila and Hughson [Blagojević], 2019). This comprises detailed studies in such arenas as global finance, corporate law, global IT hubs, FIFA, nationalism, “sustainable” development, environmental degradation, automobility, global music industry, pornography, migration, and military intelligence. Some of the themes and challenges of the book include:

• a focus on key institutions as material and ideological power centres and sites, which design and control transnational change in a manner performed mostly by men and closely related to their masculinities.
• the dynamics of global institutions in their fluid and evolving gendered forms, specifically various forms of transnational dispersed centres, and their (un)sustainability, in terms of how men and masculinities are configured and reconnected, and how they produce and conflict with each other.
• the multiple contradictions of transnational dispersed institutional centres, their forms, and men’s place within and across them, between: the nation and the transnational; centres and dispersals; spatiality and sociality; materiality and ideology/discourse; the physical and the virtual; institutional structures and events.
• whether those institutions are sustainable –economically, socially, environmentally –in the long term, and what limits the sustainability of these unsustainable institutions.
• the ideology of the sustainability paradigm itself, highlighting certain agendas (as in recent UN goals) and neglecting other agendas.
• methodological contributions to critical studies of men and masculinities through innovative, multi-method approaches.

The implications of the relations of men, masculinities, and unsustainable institutions are explored