Prof. Danny Kaplan directs the men studies track in the Gender Studies Program and teaches at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar Ilan University, Israel.
Kaplan is interested in questions of civic and national solidarity, pursuing the age-old Durkheimian question, “how do societies cohere?” In addressing these matters Kaplan adopts the cultural trope of friendship as his main conceptual apparatus, exploring how social ties are practiced and made sense of by local actors in ways that straddle the line between personal and collective experience. Kaplan applied these questions to various fields of study, among them masculinity and military culture, media and popular culture, and civic associations and conducted extensive field research in related institutions within Israeli society. His work has been published in American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Journal of Communication, American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Poetics, Political Psychology, Men and Masculinities, Nations and Nationalism, and Symbolic Interaction. He received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award by the Midwest Sociological Society for article published in Sociological Quarterly .
Kaplan’s recent book The Nation and the Promise of Friendship: Building Solidarity through Sociability was published as part of the Cultural Sociology Series in Palgrave MacMillan. He is also the author of Brothers and Others in Arms: The Making of Love and War in Israeli Combat Units (Haworth Press 2003) and The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture (Berghahn Books 2006).
Kaplan is also involved in ongoing research on non-traditional masculinity ideologies based on survey work conducted in Israel, the US, and the UK. Kaplan developed a measure of “new masculinity” ideology that resonates with the growing spread of therapeutic discourse and taps on themes of authenticity and holistic self-awareness. A related research project examines how endorsement of new masculinity ideology is associated with fathers’ involvement in childcare and how it shapes fathers’ work-family conflict and enrichment. This project is funded by the Israeli Science Foundation (in collaboration with Shira Offer).