ABSTRACT
As the largest youth faith-based organisation (FBO) in the world, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) offers a unique way to understand how transnational organisations are shaping local masculinities through complex forms of belonging and belief. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research conducted in the United Kingdom and The Gambia, I explore the interconnected geographies of space, place and attachment in the lives of the young men I worked with. As I show through ethnographic vignettes and interviews with young men, their sense of belonging is often dictated by their own sense of attachment to places and spaces beyond the YMCA, creating feelings of ambivalence and in some cases increasing their sense of alienation and marginality.
