As global divisions deepen, care and connection emerge as both urgent and undervalued social practices. Masculinities studies, long preoccupied with men’s entanglements in violence, control, and toxicity, offers a crucial site for rethinking how men relate to care as givers, receivers, and resisters. Re-examining masculinities through the lens of care and communities opens new ways of understanding power, emotion, and responsibility in contemporary life.

This year, AMSA invites participants to imagine gendered power, relationality, and resistance in new ways by asking how masculinities might be reconfigured through practices of care, towards the self, others, and community, and how these practices challenge or reinforce enduring hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability. We also want to understand how we might bridge academic and theoretical advancements with real world activism and community resistance.

We seek papers, panels, workshops, and creative projects that explore how masculinities are enacted, resisted, and transformed across diverse contexts. We especially welcome work that bridges theory, praxis, and activism, foregrounding the everyday practices of mutuality and joy that make new forms of community possible. Possible areas of engagement include (but are not limited to):

• Care work, kinship, and relational ethics;
• Surpassing ideas of “toxic” masculinity to realize new forms of masculinities;
• Healing justice, mutual aid, and community resilience;
• Masculinities and emotions, such as joy, grief, and pleasure;
• Race, coloniality, and the politics of care;
• Digital masculinities, online communities, and creative resistance;
• Technological transformations of masculinities, including algorithmic representation, digital embodiment, and AI-mediated performances of gender;
• Pedagogies and methodologies of care;
• Activism, art, and place-based practice;
• Intersectional understandings of masculinities;
• We also welcome papers, panels, workshops, and creative projects that connect to masculinities more broadly.
• If you would like to submit multiple proposals, please fill in a separate form for each one.

Centrally located and cost-effective, grounding the 2026 conference in Cleveland, Ohio enables broad participation from scholars, activists, and students across the world. The conference site sits in University Circle, one of the most culturally dense square miles in the country, and home to the Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, and the vibrant Little Italy neighborhood. Often overlooked due to histories of racism, segregation, and deindustrialization, Cleveland is now experiencing a vibrant cultural resurgence led by artists, activists, and grassroots organizers. Hosting AMSA 2026 here affirms our commitment to place-based scholarship and to the political importance of engaging with overlooked urban spaces.