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Coloniality represents the contemporary patterns of power and domination that emerged in the late 15th century during the so-called classic era of colonialism. Although much of psychology and psychological thought has adhered to the logic of coloniality, there is also a considerable body of work that has sought to decolonize psychology. It is within this latter tradition of decolonizing psychology—which seems to have gained increasing attention in recent years—that we situate this article and its attempt to articulate a decolonial Africa(n)-centered psychology that addresses itself to antiracism. While we concede that there are myriad ways by which to practice and theorize such a psychology, we focus specifically on collective antiracist struggle and everyday antiracist resistance. We conclude by considering questions of universalism and epistemology as they relate to a decolonial Africa(n)-centered psychology of antiracism.

Contributing to work that locates the place of psychology in countering coloniality, we explore in this article what and for whom is a decolonising African psychology. We answer these questions not with a definitive statement, but through several moves, signals, and routes. First, we conceptualise African psychology as a kind of transdisciplinary praxis that occurs within psychology as well as outside of the received bounds of the discipline. However, rooting this praxis-oriented psychology within a decolonial attitude ensures that African psychology takes emancipated visions of Africa and of the world from Africa—rather than the disciplinary dictums of psychology—as its starting point. Then, in considering for whom a decolonising African psychology is for, we insist that such a psychology, taken as transdisciplinary praxis, is ultimately for everyone in its humanistic commitment to those lives that have been partialised under coloniality. This commitment does not, however, render a decolonising African psychological praxis immune to recuperation, and measures must be taken to guard against this.

Following the launch of our first special issue in December 2020 (Cann et al. 2020) we are delighted to publish this second, linked issue. As evidence of the impact and dominance of Raewyn Connell’s ideas and their influence on the field, we received so many high-quality abstracts in response to our call for papers that we decided to create two collections. This second special issue of Boyhood Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal, celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Raewyn Connell’s landmark text, The Men and the Boys (2000), and hosts a wide range of international and interdisciplinary authors to highlight the continued global relevance of the book and Connell’s work more widely. This issue continues this work by showcasing an impressive array of empirical research studies and reflection pieces by emerging and leading scholars that are guided by the original themes in The Men and the Boys.

There are important gender determinants to both men’s and women’s susceptibility to COVID-19. Emerging findings confirm men are dying disproportionately at a higher rate than women. Such gender differences in deaths have informed scholars to widen their analytical look through a critical masculinity lens. As the practices to respond to the context of the gendered burden of disease are still inadequate and nearly absent on men’s health, it is suggested to specifically focus on men’s vulnerability to COVID-19 with appropriate interventions.

Suicidal behaviour (e.g., suicide and suicide attempt) is a multifaceted phenomenon which often draws on several social and psychological contexts. This research examines how men’s suicides and att...

Departing from the position that critical African psychology is an endeavour whose objective is to harness psychological knowledge in, by, for, and with Africa, as well as the world, but also to critically think Africa into psychology, this article considers space as a key idea to consider in the further development of African psychology, and more specifically, a critically inclined African psychology. Taking critical African psychology as one of the orientations within Africa(n)-centred psychology, we argue for constructing and enlarging space so as to resist ruling epistemes in psychology in and of Africa and to create oppositional spaces that adduce alternative readings and makings of psychology-in-place. We outline three pathways, namely, (1) collective thinking and writing, (2) transdisciplinarity, and (3) affective community building, via which to realise and work from a critical African psychological position. These by no means exhaust all the pathways that can be charted by critical African psychologists and are instead offered as illustrations with which our collective has been engaging, thinking together, and experimenting.

South African Medical Research Council/University of South Africa’s Masculinity and Health Research Unit The University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences.

The higher education system globally is inherently inequitable. Discriminatory practices and oppressive power dynamics are particularly prevalent in the South African higher education landscape, which is characterized by a legacy of colonialism and apartheid. As a result, although students from a wide range of backgrounds are increasingly participating in higher education, many students who do not fit the dominant status quo question their belonging within these spaces. Students’ experiences of alienation within higher education can have profoundly negative physical, pyschosocial, and education outcomes. However, students also display agency in negotiating the exclusionary institutional cultures within their universities and succeed despite these experiences. Photovoice methodology can be a useful tool for critiquing and highlighting such agentic practices, and for foregrounding the voices of students. In this research brief, we reflect on two photovoice projects that sought to examine the complexity of students’ experiences of belonging and alienation in higher education in South Africa. Our findings illustrate that although students may experience alienation on campus, they may also create spaces of belonging, “speak back” to, and challenge the exclusions inherent to campus life.

Several factors have been shown to shape the ways in which men parent/engage with their children and families. Socio-economic status, culture, history, political background, and access to paid employment are among these factors. In this chapter we focus on the ways in which precarious employment shapes the parenting practices of marginalized men in South Africa. These are men who seek work on the side of the road, often referred to as ‘day labourers’. We report on data collected through semi-structured interviews with 46 men who identified as fathers. The data was analysed using the grounded theory method of constant comparison which involved two phases of coding (initial- and focused coding). Following the coding process, the data was compared for similarities, differences, and contradictions. Lastly, the analysis involved the thematic organization of codes which resulted several main themes. The first theme explored in this chapter draws on the integration of parenting roles, where men not only focus on financial provision, but also highlight the significance of being physically present and showing their children love. The second theme we explored highlights the significance of traditional practices – amasiko – as practices of gatekeeping that hinder the involvement of men with their biological children.

The relations between men, masculinities and violence, peace, justice, and conflict are of clear importance, yet often remain unaddressed explicitly in analysis, policy, and practice. This chapter overviews the large body of feminist and critical literature on these multi-level connections. Violence, non-violence, peace, justice, conflict, and post-conflict are approached through the lens of Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities (CSMM), and in terms of theory, politics, policy, and practice. The chapter begins with an overview of CSMM as a body of scholarship informing theory, policy, and practice interventions around violence, peace, justice, and conflict at interpersonal, communal, institutional, national, and transnational levels. The authors continue with an analysis of key contributions of CSMM in understanding the challenges and possibilities of peaceful, non-violent masculinities within different levels, while acknowledging intersections and overlaps between levels. It is contended that CSMM provide necessary hope and evidence that positive peace is achievable through the transformation towards more healthy, non-violent masculinities and gender relations.

In this chapter, we offer a conversation (or rather, a product of an ongoing series of historical and current conversations) whose aim is to orient ourselves and the reader to a number of intellectual, political, practical, and theoretical concerns that surround decolonial Africa(n)-centred community psychologies. In the first part of the chapter, we explore how conversation can serve as a collective and epistemologically just modality of knowledge-making within and for Africa(n)-centred decolonial community psychologies. Conversation, we argue, is able to disrupt, build upon, appreciate and stretch some of the ways by which these psychologies are written, practiced and thought about. In the second part of the chapter, we draw upon this conversational method to consider decolonial Africa(n)-centred community psychologies through a critical, non-psychological knowledge canon. Specifically, we dialogue over what the works of Edward Said, Walter Rodney, and the Combahee River Collective are able to offer those of us who are looking to reimagine community psychologies through Africa(n)-centredness and decoloniality. We conclude by ruminating on the potentialities of form (i.e. conversation) and substance (i.e. the non-psychological canon) for decolonising Africa(n)-centred community psychologies.

Suicide is a serious but under-researched public health problem in Bangladesh. In light of this, we sought to explore the association between masculinities and suicide. We interviewed 20 family members/friends of men who died by suicide across 12 rural areas of the Jhenaidah district, Bangladesh. We found that male suicide was attributed to men’s inability to fulfil hegemonic masculine demands such as financial provision and meeting the sexual needs of their spouses. Suicide was also linked to men’s loss of self-respect and respect from others. Some participants mentioned that men committed suicide as an act of self-sacrifice, while others cited mental and physical illness. As a result of these findings, we propose that addressing socio-cultural and religious issues associated with men’s troubles may help to prevent suicide. At the same time, changing the restrictive gender roles and masculinity-related ideals is also needed to counter the problem.

This is the first ever research in Bangladesh that provides understanding about men’s postsuicide attempt reflections from a district called Jhenaidah which is assumed to be a high suicide-prone area in the country. Employing qualitative semistructured interviews with 17 men who have attempted suicide, aged 18 years and older, this research finds the survivors encountered several immediate reactions from others specifically targeting toward demeaning their masculinity. Nonetheless, they adopted several means to cope with the postsuicide episode that are thematically arranged as self-deprecation, rebuilding oneself, revenge vis-à-vis forgiveness, and impulses to escape vis-à-vis nonreactive. The postattempt episodes of the survivors are likely to be moved toward further risk factors. Therefore, it is important to take protective measures for the survivors. Specific to this district, developing a context-specific suicide prevention model, targeting the risk population could be a possible solution to the problems associated with the postattempt episodes.

It is twenty years since the publication of Raewyn Connell’s highly influential text The Men and the Boys. This book, building on feminist and pro-feminist perspectives of gender formation, was written over a ten-year period from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. It was published five years after the release of the groundbreaking text Masculinities (1995) and tackled multiple issues concerning boys and men. While providing an important platform and summary of where the research from the social science and humanities on men and masculinities stood in the year 2000, the book also contained a theoretical framework for understanding men and masculinities as part of gender relations. Importantly, the future direction of the field was outlined, and suggestions were made as to likely future agendas. These subjects included investigating the implications of globalization and its different characteristics on gender formation, the role of men’s bodies, the impact of the media and culture in men’s lives, sexuality, education, health, politics, change, violence, and peace. In recent years, questions about the lives and experiences of men and boys continue to raise remarkable media interest, public concern, and controversy on a global scale. Global changes in practices of knowledge have ensured that across the humanities and social sciences, research in the field of masculinities (of all ages) has continued to flourish and expand.

Conceptual disagreement remains rife with regard to African psychology with some scholars mistakenly equating it to, for example, ethnotheorizing and traditional healing, while others confound African psychology with Africanization and racialization. Using writing as inquiry, this article aims to clear up some of the conceptual confusion on African psychology while engaging with the issue of a decolonizing African psychology. Accordingly, questions such as ‘What is the main dispute between Africa(n)-centred psychology and Euro-American-centric psychology in Africa?’; ‘Does Africa(n)-centred psychology not homogenize Africans?’; ‘What can be gained from imbricating decolonizing perspectives and feminist Africa(n)-centred psychology?’; and ‘What would a decolonizing Africa(n)-centred community psychology look like?’ are pertinent in the clarification of the conceptual confusion. Arising from an inventive dialogical and collaborative method, the aim of this article is not only to illuminate some basic misunderstandings on (a) decolonizing African psychology but also to generate further dialogue on how to work towards African psychology as situated decolonizing practice and knowledge.

Young people in contemporary South Africa inhabit a multiplicity of diverse, often contradictory, economic and socio-cultural contexts. These contexts offer a range of possibilities and opportuniti...

Recent work on African psychology (Long, 2016; Makhubela, 2016; Nwoye, 2015) has restaged, and at times perhaps worsened, the decades-old confusion about the definition, scope, impetus for, and ultimate aims of an African psychology within South Africa (SA). A clarification – and perhaps more than just a clearing up – is warranted about the stimulus, prevailing and possible meanings, end-goal, and horizons, but also how, in light of the call for the decolonisation of higher education in SA, we – meaning students, teachers, researchers, therapists – might design African psychology university courses, research, professional programmes and therapies, as well as networks. An attempt is made to explicate what appear to be basic misperceptions by responding, after a fashion, to some frequently asked questions about African psychology – as well as other questions that usually remain unasked.

Focused on African and black men and masculinities, this chapter draws attention to the minimisation and ignorance of the historical and persisting effects of slavery and coloniality on some men’s lives within studies of men and masculinities. The chapter deploys C. L. R. James’s dramatisation of Toussaint L’Ouverture revolt against slavery, against a man as property, as a resource with which to think about masculinity. The chapter contends that, because under slavery some men and women were property, the notion that some males are non-men who express non-masculinity is planted. If masculinity is a place in gender relations, what then is the place of non-men and non-masculinity in masculinity studies? This chapter contends that as there is (a) no-place for these non-men and non-masculinity in the field of masculinity, researchers are challenged with idea of studying non-men, blackgenders and non-masculinity.

Abstract. Background: Suicide and attempted suicide are a serious but under-explored public health problem in Bangladesh. Survey estimates suggest that Jhenaidah District, one of the 64 districts that make up Bangladesh, is one of the highest suicide-prone regions in Bangladesh. Relatively little is known about the magnitude of suicide attempts in the district. Aims: This article describes the incidence of suicide and suicide attempts for Jhenaidah, Bangladesh for the period 2010–2018. Method: Primary descriptive analysis was performed on routine data collected by a Bangladesh-based nongovernment organization (NGO): Societies for Voluntary Activities (SOVA). Results: A total of 22,675 suicide attempts and 3,152 suicides occurred in the district. The rate of suicide attempts was found to be 136.35/100,000 and the suicide rate was found to be 20.6/100,000 in Jhenaidah. The subdistrict Sadar had the highest incidence of suicide attempt (38.09%) and suicide (33.47%). Poisoning was the most common method of suicide attempt for both males (77.07%) and females (77%). Limitations: Many cases of suicide attempts and suicide are unreported in Bangladesh owing to stigmatization; only reported cases form part of this investigation. Conclusion: Jhenaidah has very high rates of suicide and suicide attempts that surpass the global and Bangladesh averages. Although females demonstrate higher suicide rates, male suicide rates have gradually increased over the study period. Future studies are called for to better understand the local patterns and dynamics of fatal and nonfatal suicidal behaviors. Developing a sub-district-, district-, and national-level suicide prevention strategy ought to be considered a priority.