Displaced masculinities: young men navigating manhood, education and the climate crisis in urban Uganda

Abstract

This article foregrounds the everyday experiences, expectations and emergent masculinities of young refugee men from South Sudan who live in the city of Gulu in Northern Uganda. Both age and gender norms converge in young masculinities that are (re)produced, evolve and negotiated at the intersection of contingent and precarious socio-cultural fields of forced displacement, gendered mobility, and the emerging urban climate crisis. We ask how young refugee men are negotiating their masculinities while seeking education and livelihoods in Gulu. Drawing on creative methodologies and an intersectional gender analysis, we highlight the tensions of these negotiations between family, society and host community expectations, and situate them amidst a series of interlocking urban vulnerabilities– economic, socio-political, environmental. Young refugee men and urban migrants are often invisible in discussions of climate change and urban governance, and their hopeful and emergent masculinities neglected in work on forced displacement and post-conflict contexts. In addressing these together, we centre African masculinities within gender and climate geographies; exploring the vulnerabilities and hopes of young urban migrants and refugees in the face of displacement and environmental disadvantages. Our article highlights how masculinities, temporalities and place are inextricably bound together, with the city itself – both its precarious environment and the futures it promises. A focus on everyday life allows us to better understand how gender orders and norms shape the experiences, vulnerabilities and temporalities of young men coming of age at the peripheries, highlighting the diversity of young men’s experiences and vulnerabilities in an African city.