Short Abstract

This panel explores how men in Africa practise, negotiate, and contest care – beyond provisioning – across fatherhood, friendship, labour, ritual, and human–non-human relations, revealing its moral ambivalence, power dynamics, and everyday complexity.

Long Abstract

This panel examines the various ways in which care is practised, negotiated, and morally evaluated in men’s lives across diverse African contexts. In many settings, men are usually expected to ‘care’ primarily through provisioning – meeting obligations such as bridewealth, school fees, and housing. As a result, men’s caregiving roles are frequently rendered invisible or reduced to economic responsibility alone. Yet men are deeply implicated in caregiving relations in families, communities, workplaces, and institutions. They care for, and are cared for by, a range of human and non-human others. Yet, what constitutes ‘care’ is often morally ambivalent, contested, or entangled with power and inequalities, and while it may imply intimacy, obligation, protection, labour, or ritual it, at times, also implies violence. Think, for instance of fatherhood, friendship, human–non-human relations, conservation and guardianship, counselling and health work, ritual practice or intergenerational relations. Therefore, this panel investigates how masculinities of care are practiced, contested, and reimagined in these everyday yet complex relational practices.

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