Critical Friendship in the Modern World

Laura Eramian is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at Dalhousie University, Canada. She is author of Peaceful Selves: Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda (2018), which received an Honourable Mention for the Labrecque-Lee Book Prize. Peter Mallory is a sociologist and Associate Professor at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. He is author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters on representations of friendship in social theory and in personal life.

• Contributors; Acknowledgments; Introduction: advancing a critical approach to friendship Peter Mallory and Laura Eramian; Part I. Critical Intimacies, Differences, and Ruptures: 1. Critical friendships revisited: crisis and the temporalities of critical associations Katherine Davies and Brian Heaphy; 2. Youth-adult intergenerational friendships: sociality across difference at the skatepark Devan Hunter; 3. Complaint and friendship: navigating shifting inclusions Susan MacDougall; 4. What makes difficult friendships persist? Justifying the 'good enough friend' Laura Eramian and Peter Mallory; Part II. Critical Sociabilities Beyond the Private: 5. 'It didn't come from the heart': enactments, meanings, and assessments of girls' friendship performances Thalia Thereza Assan; 6. Domesticating urban space: everyday practices of friendship in a mall in Beijing Meng Xu; 7. Friendship dyads and groups of friends: intimacy, discretion, and the negotiation of privacy and publicness Harry Blatterer; 8. Unleashing friendship: forced interaction and dog parks as friendship facilitating spaces Mervyn Horgan and Saara Liinamaa; Part III. Critical Relational Junctures: 9. 'Friends and fun' as a queer relation in Beirut Mathew Gagné; 10. The relational organization of friendship and coupledom in midlife Jenny van Hooff; Part IV. Afterword: 11. A critical (but friendly) look at critical friendship Lisa-Jo K van den Scott and Gary Alan Fine; Index.