The current climate-conditions of a global pandemic have heightened many people’s awareness of the weaknesses, the inequities, and the systemic failings of support systems both nationally and internationally. Michael Kehler, the Masculinities Research Professor, at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, invites us all to think about our own locker rooms.
Typically associated with boys, masculinity, and the retreat of the old boy’s clubs, Kehler points to the locker rooms of our workspaces, the board rooms, the cafeterias, the spaces, and places we go to, knowing full-well what the rules and norms are for being in. While inviting us to consider norms, rules, and the spaces that bind us to be one of the gang, he suggests there are ways to disrupt, challenge and interrupt those spaces as “just the way it is.”
With a focus on gender arrangements, Kehler raises questions about masculinities and the ways boys and men navigate being men. His activist, agitating and disruptive call invites us all to consider how allyship within and among men and most importantly, alongside women, can inform the way forward, a way to change, a way to be advocates addressing violence, addressing gender-based discrimination. His talk allows us all to reconsider men as change agents and men as allies. MeToo was the opening up of a conversation, Dr. Michael Kehler hopes to carry on and continue extending the conversation by unsettling masculinities, power, and the will to be unlike the rest of the boys.
Speaker: Dr. Michael Kehler, PhD, Research Professor / Masculinities Studies in Education Werklund School of Education / University of Calgary