Transforming Masculinities Through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Reflections on Building a Community of Practice Framework

Abstract

Interdisciplinary, local, regional, and cross-regional efforts are required to further men’s gender justice engagement on a global scale. There is limited understanding of how cross-regional collaborations account for intersectionality, geo-political differences among stakeholders, and the value of local strategies when designing and sharing prevention frameworks. Catalyzed by emerging and long-standing gender equity movements, our interdisciplinary research team from Canada, the Caribbean, Nepal, and Pakistan employed a community of practice (CoP) framework to share and mobilize research and experiential knowledge with the purpose of promoting regional and cross-regional strategies to involve men in gender justice efforts. Through a collective process, we co-created position statements, process dimensions, and key CoP activities to root our international collaboration. In this article, we emphasize the unique local contexts for our work and the learnings that emerged from our CoP. We propose a framework that can be used to advance collective and interdisciplinary agendas across global contexts and further the work of groups committed to transformative social change.