Book Chapter

Belonging without believing? Making space for marginal masculinities at the Young Men’s Christian Association in the United Kingdom and The Gambia

Abstract

As the largest youth faith-based organisation (FBO) in the world, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) offers a unique way to understand how transnational organisations are shaping local masculinities through complex forms of belonging and belief. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research conducted in the United Kingdom and The Gambia, I explore the interconnected geographies of space, place and attachment in the lives of the young men I worked with. As I show through ethnographic vignettes and interviews with young men, their sense of belonging is often dictated by their own sense of attachment to places and spaces beyond the YMCA, creating feelings of ambivalence and in some cases increasing their sense of alienation and marginality.

Attached files

Authors

Wignall, Ross

Oxford Brookes departments

Department of Social Sciences

Dates

Year of publication: 2019
Date of RADAR deposit: 2020-02-04

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All rights reserved.

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Related resources

This RADAR resource is the Accepted Manuscript of Belonging without believing? Making space for marginal masculinities at the Young Men’s Christian Association in the United Kingdom and The Gambia
This RADAR resource is Part of Youth, place and theories of belonging [ISBN: 9781138559622] / edited by Sadia Habib, Michael Ward (Routledge, 2019).