Overview

Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, Laura Eramian and Peter Mallory offer a comprehensive conceptualization of 'critical friendship' across its diverse meanings. Drawing on contemporary insights and cross-cultural examples from interdisciplinary contributors, the chapters examine the ambivalence of friendship, its entanglements with other relations or institutions, the quest for selfhood and recognition, and how friendship finds meaning across private and public life. Through an empirically rich evaluation of the multiple ways that friendship is practiced, valued, or interpreted, this volume advances critical debates on friendship across social psychology, anthropology, sociology and beyond.

Full Product Details

Author:   Laura Eramian (Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia) ,  Peter Mallory ( St. Francis Xavier University)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781009635400

ISBN 10:   1009635409
Pages:   236
Publication Date:   19 March 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
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Table of Contents

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.

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Author Information

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.

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