Strengthening global, intersectional and decolonial approaches to men and masculinities within higher education

The funding was awarded by the Community of Learning & Education (CLI) at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR).

Led by Dr Karin Astrid Siegmann, Dr Bilge Sahin and Dr Saad Ali Khan the project brings together a multidisciplinary teaching team from ISS and partner institutions in Turkey and Pakistan to strengthen global, intersectional and decolonial approaches to men and masculinities within higher education.

What the course entails

The 'Global Critical Men and Masculinities' course combines theory, experiential learning, visual methods and cultural analysis, drawing on global and comparative perspectives.

Key thematic components

• Theorizing global and intersectional masculinities
• Decolonizing histories of men and masculinity
• Hegemonic, conflicting and transformed masculinities
• Masculinities in work, politics, faith and cultural production
• Transformative and participatory methods, including film and visualization

Teaching formats range from lectures and tutorials to workshops, film screenings and group-based creative assignments, culminating in a summative course assessment.

International and EUR-wide collaboration

A central innovation of the project is its collaborative and transnational design. The course will be offered EUR-wide, making it accessible to students across Erasmus University Rotterdam. In addition, the project involves international collaboration with partner institutions in Ankara (TED University) and Islamabad (Centre for Excellence in Gender Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University).

This collaborative model enables:

• Cross-regional learning and comparative perspectives
• Exchange between students and scholars from Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East
• Shared pedagogical development across institutions

Educational goal

The proposal responds to intertwined political, scholarly and pedagogical challenges, including the global rise of anti-gender politics and the dominance of Global North perspectives in critical men and masculinities studies, which limits the field’s ability to capture how patriarchal power operates across contexts. 

Pedagogically, the absence of a coherent programme on men and masculinities at EUR – combined with reduced internationalization and classroom diversity – restricts students’ exposure to plural epistemologies and weakens efforts to decolonize gender education. 

The goal of this educational innovation is to create an inclusive hybrid learning environment that revitalises critical men and masculinities within gender studies by enabling transnational, dialogic engagement across geopolitical contexts. By combining digital and in-person learning grounded in feminist and critical pedagogies, the project positions hybrid education as a political and epistemic strategy to challenge hegemonic, patriarchal and colonial hierarchies in knowledge production.

Strengthening gender-transformative education

By globalizing critical men and masculinities education, this CLI-funded project contributes to ISS’s commitment to socially engaged teaching and to Development Studies that confront power, inequality and transformation head-on. It offers students the opportunity to critically engage with gender not only as an issue affecting women, but as a relational system that shapes societies, institutions and development pathways worldwide.