The John D. and Catherin T. MacArthur Foundation is funding a new Center for the Study and Men and Masculinities to be led by Michael Kimmel, PhD.
Stony Brook University’s Michael Kimmel, PhD, a professor of sociology and one of the leading researchers and writers in the world on men and masculinity, is receiving two-year, $300,000 start-up grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. With additional funding from the university, as well as foundation and private support, Stony Brook is establishing a Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities in the fall of 2013.
The MacArthur Foundation gave over $215-million in grants to a variety of causes last year. The foundation “supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society.”
The new center will host monthly seminars and several large forums each year, titled “Challenging Conversations,” as well as the very first international conference on Men and Masculinities in 2015. Its purpose will be to build both a local and worldwide community of academics and activists and develop a new Master’s program in masculinity studies in association with the university’s Department of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies.
“The emerging field is international and interdisciplinary,” said Kimmel, who has also authored such books as Guyland and Angry White Men: American Masculinity and the End of Entitlement. “Much work on masculinities uses the prisms of feminist theory, multiculturalism, and queer theory, and discussions of differences among men (by race, class, sexuality, age, religion, region, and the like) are just as salient as discussions of similarities and differences between women and men.
Kimmel is also the founder and editor of Stony Brooks prestigious scholarly journal Men and Masculinities, which publishes four times each year. His goals for the center are to engage people in conversation about the ever-changing nature of masculinity and for it to become a place for gathering global research on the topic:
I intend it to be a place where that dialogue between researchers and practitioners, between academics and activists, will be the central defining feature. It is a conversation that I find too rare on both sides of that divide: academics who know little about what is happening on the ground, and activists who think they are inventing the wheel each time they develop a new program. […] The conference will do more than merely inaugurate the Center; it will establish it as the single most visible institutional arena for furthering this urgent dialogue. These conversations will produce new research projects, deepen programs already in existence, and suggest the sorts of collaborative work that can generate local, national and regional policies.
Though the center will not be the first of its kind—Western Illinois University and the University of Missouri both have centers for the study of men and masculinity—the conference will be a pioneering event in the field.
“It will be the first conference devoted specifically to the dialogue between researchers and practitioners,” Kimmel said, “which will be reflected in the session organizations eschewing traditional formal paper delivery in favor of specific global dialogues about ‘What do we know?’ and ‘What do we need to know?’”
Photo: Dr. Michael Kimmel
Stony Brook University Creating Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities
http://sbstatesman.com/2013/08/26/new-center-for-masculine-studies-under-fire/
center’s current advisory board – big names like Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Carol Gilligan and Eve Ensler—four very prominent American feminists
This is hardly a place for helping men with their problems, it’s a place for feminists ‘to study’ about men.
Somewhat disappointing. USD 300.000,- for start-up? What are they doing with this money?
Just a word to welcome that this new center. It, surely, be helpful for Americans to go forward int he study of men and masculinities. But, I am a bit fascinated about self-identifying the announced 2015 conference as the 1st one with this proportion and objectives even if Kimmel himself knows that there were some before. Just take a lokk at the proceedings of the 2011 Quebec international conference http://www.mensstudies.info/books/future-perspectives-intervention-policy-research-on-men-masculinities/ which offer a broad theoritical perspectives in the field. This conference gathered between the mos important researchers, practitioners, as well as policy makers. Nordic countries, Autralia, Mexico and others have… Read more »
The title may say it all “…. Study of Men….” Rather than Center for the Advancement of Men….
I can almost guarantee there won’t be a course on ” Hitting a Curve Ball; On the Diamond and In the Board Room”
I would like to see a men’s center actually provide understanding and support to men and a place for men to help each other.
Unfortunately this is Michael Kimmel so it will most likely be a place to dispense feminist theory and tell men that all their so-called problems are the result of privilege and entitlement.
Yes indeed – this is the author of Guyland, the fashionable expose on privileged, white, patriarchal young men who stalk university corridors.
I’m near certain the syllabus will be heavy Carol Gilligan with a sprinkle of anti-porn rhetoric.
Just what every struggling young man needs to catch his stride.
Just how many masculinities are there anyway? And “says who?” Sheer solipsism on the oart of some Ivory Tower types!
Any protests planned against this? He should be prepared for some angry backlash, and from multiple directions.
I hope not! Michael Kimmel is awesome and this is much needed.
Given that Kimmel pays nods to feminism more than likely there will be no such protests. Its just the outsiders that get treated like that. Not paying such nods is taken as inherent sign of being irresponsible or of a dislike of women.
But if there is room for more than “if we can address how society favors men (and make all harms done to men out to be collateral damage of harming women) then everything will be fine” then all the better I say.