Transnational reflections on transnational research projects on men, boys and gender relations

Abstract

This article reflects on the research project, ‘Engaging South African and Finnish youth towards new traditions of non-violence, equality and social well-being’, funded by the Finnish and South African national research councils, in the context of wider debates on research, projects and transnational processes. The project is located within a broader analysis of research projects and projectization (the reduction of research to separate projects), and the increasing tendencies for research to be framed within and as projects, with their own specific temporal and organizational characteristics. This approach is developed further in terms of different understandings of research across borders: international, comparative, multinational and transnational. Special attention is given to differences between research projects that are in the Europe and the EU, and projects that are between the global North and the global South. The theoretical, political and practical challenges of the North-South research project are discussed.

Keywords:

• boys
• Europe
• gender
• global
• men
• North-South
• projects
• research projects
• transnational

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the members of the ‘Engaging South African and Finnish youth towards new traditions of non-violence, equality and social well-being’ project for both research collaboration and discussions on these issues, the funding from South African (NRF), Finnish (SA) and Swedish (VR) Research Councils, and especially to Kopano Ratele for constructive comments on an earlier version, and Pekka Buttler for information on project organization.

Notes

1. I should immediately add here a qualification that the terms, ‘North’ and ‘South’ are unsatisfactory glosses that need to be treated with caution. On this point Arora-Jonsson (2009, p. 215) writes:

When one is discussing gender, equality, or empowerment, the challenge is to look beyond macrogeneralizations while also avoiding a fixation on difference between the places. By arguing that relationships of power can determine flows of ideas on equality, I do not imply that the North or the South is symbolically or ideologically fixed or that there is a homogenous body of ideas.

2. Eva Moberg is well known for an article she published in 1961 as a young academic, provocatively entitled ‘Women's conditional liberation’. This critically scrutinized the dominant framework of the Swedish women's movement, attacking, as ‘conditional liberation’, the notion of ‘women's two roles’: one as mother, another as worker. Instead, she argued for dual roles for both women and men; substantial change in the gender order; and women's entrance to public life paralleled by a similar entry of men into the private.

3. Jan Vandemoortele (2013, p. 5) writes:

High inequalities … lead to the concentration of political power in the hands of those who possess economic wealth, thereby undermining the workings of a democratic system. They generate divisions and internal strife, usually with undemocratic outcomes. The pathology of high inequalities includes powerful special interests and entrenched political polarization; which delay policy reforms and impede counter-cyclical measures.

4. Finland has a significant language minority of about 5% first language Swedish-speaking Finns. Swedish is a full official language and speakers have full language rights. Thus there are state Swedish-speaking institutions such as schools and universities.

5. However, even this needs immediate qualification, as in the South African context, a little like some Central and East European post-socialist contexts, some academics tend to have and wish to take a less compartmentalized view of disciplines and their own main discipline than is the case in more privileged regions. In saying this, I am thinking of how in EU projects Central and East European academics are sometimes drawn into, say, social science research projects through feminist or other commitments, even when their disciplinary background is in the humanities.

6. As Raewyn Connell (2014, p. 218) has noted:

In this larger [academic] economy, as the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1997) has shown, there is a broad division of labour on a world scale. The global metropole is where most journals are located, most theory and methodology are produced, and data are aggregated in libraries, museums, data banks and research centres. Most of the material resources for scholarship, such as well-funded universities, doctoral programmes, research funds, journals and conferences, are located here. The role of the global periphery is by contrast to supply data, and later to apply science in practical ways. (also see Connell, 2007)

However, Hountondji also makes a large point than simply the South serving the North, namely the case for less ‘extraversion’ towards the North on the part of Southern researchers. What might also be suggested by his work is that Southern- and Northern-based research and researcher should find better, less colonialist or imperialist ways of working together or even separately, as in ‘mutual learning across boundaries’. I am grateful to Kopano Ratele for this clarification.

Additional information

Funding

This article results from a 3-year collaborative transnational research project ‘Engaging South African and Finnish youth towards new traditions of non-violence, equality and social well-being’, funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, and the Academy of Finland.

Notes on contributors

Jeff Hearn

Jeff Hearn is Professor of Management and Organisation, Hanken School of Economics, Finland; Guest Research Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, based in the Centre for Feminist Social Studies, Örebro University, Sweden; and Professor of Sociology, University of Huddersfield, UK. His latest book is Men of the World: Genders, Globalization, Transnational Times, Sage, 2015.