What's care got to do with it?

What is your postdoctoral project about?

This research project is located at the intersection of gender, care, and ecological activism. Starting from the concept of caring masculinities, the project seeks to broaden the scope of Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) on men and care by investigating caring masculinities in the context of youth climate activism. In short: the project asks how caring masculinities – those that embrace care and reject domination – are at play in the fight against the climate crisis.

I will be interested in questions like: How do young men’s trajectories into climate activism look like? How might these insights be leveraged to promote ideals of masculinity in the service of climate justice? But also: what is the relationship between young men’s ‘private’ and ‘political’ care work, and do they understand their work as care at all? And in what ways are other-centered dispositions (a term that Niall Hanlon uses in his work on men and care) at work in young men’s activism against climate change and for environmental justice?

One important question in discussions around caring masculinities that my former colleagues Steven Roberts and Karla Elliott at Monash University and I have been asking is what role domination and non-domination play when we speak of caring masculinities. For this project that means: what are young men’s alignments or active modes of distancing from dominating behavior and what does that look like in practice? How does it shape their climate activism? In all of this, I will be looking at how young men’s diverse practices of caring masculinities intersect with other axis of power such as class, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, sexual orientation, gender presentation and ability. Previous work suggests that caring masculinities – those that tick both boxes of embracing care and rejecting domination – are more likely to be embraced by marginalized men.

What brought you to this topic?

In many ways the project is a continuation of previous work, but in a different context. I have been working with the concept of caring masculinities theoretically and also in an empirical project in Australia, where my colleagues and I investigated barriers and drivers of men’s participation in the health care and social assistance sector.

I have also long been interested in climate justice but have not done research in this field. However, the connections between gender and climate change are obvious. Not only care work, but climate activism and care within the climate movement, have been gendered as feminine, while environmental and social destruction has long been linked to negative masculine ideals. There is a lot of research on this harking back to ecofeminist scholarship but also within CSMM with scholars highlighting how 'petro-masculinity' or 'radioactive masculinities' are key in upholding destructive gendered capitalist and militaristic structures.

Scholars such as Stephen Burrell and Cassie Pedersen – working in the field of green criminology – frame the climate crises as a problem of men’s violence. They elaborate how environmental destruction is deeply rooted in traditional notions of masculinity that are defined through being strong, tough and independent, as well as dominating and in control (over others and the natural world).

Martin Hultman and Paul Pulé, also working at the intersection of CSMM and environmental justice, seek to unearth what they call "ecological masculinities" as a constructive third way. While they do not really engage with caring masculinities conceptually in their first book , I would still understand ecological masculinities as caring masculinities in this context. So, in a way, Hultman and Pulé, similar to Burrell and Pedersen, aim to highlight non-destructive, non-dominating ways of men relating to other human, and non-human people, and the planet. This is also what my project seeks to do, and I believe that at a moment of intersecting crises – among them, a crisis of care and looming ecological collapse – this is really important work.

Which methodology do you intend to use?

My work has always been very interdisciplinary. I did my PhD in an interdisciplinary program in Sydney, where my primary supervisor, Allison Weir, was a feminist philosopher. I am drawn to conceptual work, but with a background in anthropology I have also continued to work with qualitative research methods. For this project, I will interview young men and attend climate protests. I also plan to observe group meetings of youth climate activists.

What makes your research relevant to the public?

I believe that research at the intersection of climate change and climate justice and men and masculinities is highly relevant. Not least because technofixes (such as carbon capture and storage, solar geo-engineering and the like) are now being peddled as solutions to the current crises by powerful actors. This is ignoring that these technofixes are absolutely aligned with masculinized stances of being in control, or regaining control, of dominating the planet and its inhabitants, of, essentially, standing apart from the world. All of which points to particular practices and ideologies of masculinity that form an integral part of what lead us into this mess, so to say.

What we need instead of control, and here I connect back to the world of care ethics (in which I am also deeply immersed), is a deep understanding of the fact that we are always already vulnerable, always already interdependent, always already in need of reciprocal, responsive relations and part of nature that we need to care for and with.

At the moment there seems to be an appetite for sensationalist reporting on all the ‘toxic’ things men do. And don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely crucial that researchers look at these phenomena – be it the further and further rise of (masculinist) right-wing politics and its intersections with trans- and queerphobia, but also with ableism and fatphobia in the name of ‘saving civilization’, or be it the manosphere, facilitated by algorithmic oligarchies and all that entails, and of course also the overlapping of ecological destruction, militarism and similar with masculinist ideologies. I am grateful that many of my colleagues are doing this central work.

However, I think it is also important to spotlight those men who are bringing something positive to the table that might change this world for the better. This research should be neither uncritical nor naïve, but maybe hopeful and with earnest openness. We need to see those positive movements as well, so that they may – hopefully – grow. This is what I hope my project will contribute to.