Casey Fellows Speaker Series

Launched in 2018, The Casey Fellows Program for Mental Health and Student Wellbeing brings world-renowned experts in the field of wellbeing to Upper Canada College, and is made possible by the generosity of Matthew Casey ’83. 

Internationally recognized NYU developmental psychologist Dr. Niobe Way has spent nearly 40 years conducting empirical studies with teenagers, particularly boys and young men from diverse backgrounds. Her social science research, which focuses on social and emotional development and how cultural ideologies shape child development, has made her a go-to expert on friendships, loneliness, teenagers, gender stereotypes, masculinity, and the roots of violence. In her pioneering new book, Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our  Culture (Dutton | July 9, 2024), Way draws a direct line from her subjects’ insights — and suffering — to a much wider crisis that is impacting us all, but is in our power to change.  

Rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide are soaring, particularly among young people. Mass violence seems almost commonplace, and virtually all of it is committed by young men between the ages of 18 and 25. Experts across fields are pointing fingers at various causes and surefire remedies. But as Way reveals in Rebels with a Cause, if we listen with curiosity to what boys and young men have to say, we learn that these are all symptoms of a crisis of connection caused by a culture that prizes the hard over the soft, thinking over feeling, the me over we, stoicism over vulnerability, when our humanity is rooted. This “boy” culture — so-called because it is based on a caricature of a boy, not because it accurately reflects them — is killing our boys and harming us all.

Dr. Niobe Way is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH), co-founder of agapi.teens, and the PI on the Listening Project. Dr. Way was the President of the Society for Research on Adolescence, received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, her doctoral degree from Harvard, and was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at Yale in the psychology department.