Conference Agenda

This paper presents the findings from the framework analysis of a broader mixed-methods study exploring social connection as a protective factor to support the behavioural health of young men in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It included interviews with 30 young men aged 16-19 from working-class communities, evenly representing the region’s two predominant communities: Catholics and Protestants.

The study used a gender lens to examine how the pressures to perform particular types of masculine identity shaped the ways relationships formed and operated in young men’s lives. Although they are disproportionately vulnerable to poor mental health, injuries related to interface violence and substance use, and exploitation by paramilitary organisations, this demographic is often excluded or marginalised in research. Study recruitment was conducted through partnerships with community-based youth work and restorative justice organisations, allowing for the application of a strengths-based analysis.

I will present the experiences of these young men, highlighting the people and structures they found most impactful in the delivery of both individual-level behavioural health supports and community-level violence interruption. The most emergent theme was the role of their youth workers, who were often themselves men from the community in early adulthood. These figures acted as “masculine exemplars” and presented a powerful–and positive–counter to online influencers like Andrew Tate who was, at the time of the study, “the most googled man on the planet.”

I will further reflect on the study’s secondary outcome, the testing of the new Andrizo Integrated Conceptual Framework, which combines theoretical bodies on gender, adolescent development, and suicidology to articulate the ways that these factors interact to generate suicide risk in adolescent males. The framework is currently being explored by youth work organisations as a mechanism to enhance the development of interventions to support the health and wellbeing of young men in Belfast.

Patriarchal masculine conditioning of boys and men is a pervasive social entrainment, a peremptory circumscribing of the multitude of male bodies: corporeal, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, until the (patriarchal) mask of incommensurable humanity has fixed itself insensate over the fault lines of an authentic life. This paper applies cultural neuroscience and neuroanthropological conceptualizations of liminality to theorize the importance of inner experience and the transmutive potencies of ritual to produce neuroplastic ecologies capable of becoming, metabolizing and integrating elements of the wound body leading to new gestalts of being. An autoethnographic sharing of one man’s descent into the patriarchal wound body, into ecstatic grief ritual, dissolving into a sympoietic liminality is threaded throughout the paper. Discussion of healthy masculinities includes feminist and indigenous masculinities.

Violence against women (VAW) remains a global issue, with unique challenges in some Muslim-majority nations due to complex socio-economic, cultural, and historical factors. While much is known about the causes of VAW, less is documented about Muslim men actively engaged in preventing it. This article presents findings from the Turkey portion of our “Transforming Muslim Masculinities” study, in which we interviewed Turkish men about their life trajectories and motivations for engaging in VAW prevention. The findings highlight key influences shaping men’s views on gender justice, such as important milestones and life trajectories, involvement in academics, and Islamic perspectives on equity. Subsequently, the findings reveal barriers faced by men in their journeys, such as cultural norms, complex socio-political factors, and pushback from local communities. Moreover, these models offer culturally sensitive strategies for engaging Turkish men in gender-equity efforts and practical approaches for promoting gender justice in similar cultural contexts within Muslim-majority societies and beyond.

What happens when we ask a man about his penis — not to pathologise, objectify, or sexualise, but to listen? To listen to the stories that live in the body, the sensations that are rarely spoken, and the meanings that men have never been asked to give voice to?

This paper explores the penis as a site of lived experience and relational knowledge. Drawing from performative writing and long-term therapeutic work with men, I trace the ways in which masculinity has been disciplined into silence — the soft, sensing, relational penis eclipsed by cultural scripts of hardness, dominance, and control.

To ask about the penis is to stay in dialogue with what we often avoid: male fragility, desire, shame, and tenderness. In the current climate, where online communities like the manosphere fill the void of male conversation, this act of asking becomes radical. It reclaims curiosity, restores complexity, and invites men into genuine contact rather than ideological performance.

Framed as both qualitative inquiry and performative gesture, this presentation brings fragments of male embodiment into the room — not to resolve or defend them, but to listen with care. Through these dialogues, I suggest that the therapist, researcher, and audience alike are called to reimagine the penis not as a symbol of power, but as a site of relation, sensation, and story.