Conference Agenda

In an era of online polarisation and ideological fragmentation, dialogue with men has become increasingly fraught. The cultural terrain around masculinity is dominated by competing narratives of grievance, shame, and defensiveness, often amplified through digital ecosystems such as the manosphere. Within these spaces, men’s longing for contact and recognition is both revealed and distorted. Qualitative inquiry, with its emphasis on lived experience, relational knowing, and reflexivity, is well placed to re-open spaces of dialogue. Yet our methods and vocabularies for listening to men remain underdeveloped or shaped by suspicion.

This Game Changer proposes a three-day interdisciplinary think tank to develop a collective framework for menempathy: the capacity to stay in feeling-with men, even when expressions of pain, anger, or confusion challenge our values or identities. Menempathy is not a plea for sympathy or agreement; it is a qualitative stance of curiosity, contact, and complexity. It asks how researchers, educators, and therapists can listen to men without collapsing into either justification or rejection, how we might hold dialogue open when cultural discourse urges closure.

Drawing from psychotherapy, education, gender studies, and the arts, this initiative invites participants to explore:

- How can qualitative research respond to the emotional and epistemological estrangement of men in contemporary culture?

- What forms of writing, storytelling, and methodology can foster genuine contact with male experience?

- How might we listen to male bodies, to sensation, vulnerability, and pleasure, beyond traditional frames of pathology, dominance, or crisis?

- What does it mean for me, as a woman, as a queer researcher, as a non-male participant — to stay in dialogue with men?

- What does it mean to write or research with men rather than about them?

Participants will examine how qualitative inquiry can engage men’s lived realities through embodied, narrative, and performative approaches. The aim is to articulate methodological tools for staying in dialogue: practices of presence, language, and relational attunement that can operate across disciplines and settings.

While the inquiry centres on dialogue with men, this Game Changer welcomes participants of all genders. Menempathy is not a call to recentre men, but to re-examine the relational field in which genders meet. For women and non-male participants, these sessions offer space to explore positions in relation to masculinity, the tensions of listening, witnessing, or holding space when histories of exclusion or harm are present. The think tank thus becomes a shared workshop in reciprocal empathy, where staying in dialogue is an act of mutual recognition rather than gendered concession.

The three sessions unfold in dialogical stages:

Day One: Listening Across Silence

We map how men’s voices appear or disappear in research and classrooms. Participants share experiences of breakdown — moments when dialogue with male participants, students, or clients faltered. Through reflective discussion and performative exercises, we identify affective dynamics (shame, defensiveness, fear) that shape these silences.

Day Two: Methodologies of Contact

We turn to methodological experimentation. How can performative writing, autoethnography, and arts-based inquiry open new stories of masculinity? How can the researcher’s body and gendered history become part of the inquiry? Small groups sketch methodological vignettes — fragments of possible research grounded in menempathy.

Day Three: Articulating Menempathy

The final session focuses on synthesis. Drawing from the insights and tensions of previous days, participants co-author a short position paper, “Principles for Staying in Dialogue with Men,” to be shared in the conference plenary. This document articulates core principles and provocations — not a policy, but a living invitation to ongoing dialogue.

The Game Changer seeks to reimagine masculinity as a field of qualitative attention, not an object of ideological dispute. It does not attempt to redeem or critique “men” as a category but to create methodological space for men’s becoming, for stories, sensations, and uncertainties that remain unspoken. Menempathy names both the challenge and the possibility of this work: to feel-with men while maintaining reflexive awareness of power, privilege, and social context. It calls for research practices that move beyond binaries of fragile versus toxic, ally versus adversary, listener versus speaker, toward a more entangled understanding of how gendered lives are co-constituted through relation.

At a time when public conversations about men oscillate between outrage and apathy, qualitative inquiry can offer something different: an attentive, dialogical, and creative space of research-as-relation. Through this Game Changer, we invite scholars and practitioners of all genders to experiment with how empathy itself might be rewritten — to see in menempathy not a defence of masculinity, but a shared, qualitative commitment to stay in conversation with what feels most difficult to hear.