Call for Abstracts

Friendship remains undervalued in theorisations of social change. The contemporary backdrop of global crises demands openness to alliances across boundaries and vigilant effort to address the “big issues” that confront us. Can we, as scholars, do more to demonstrate the ways in which personal relationships (and particularly friendship) can bring about meaningful social change?

This transdisciplinary workshop invites abstracts based on research from across cultural contexts that ask “new” questions or adopt innovative methodological approaches to advance thinking on continuities and social change by deploying friendship as a lens. As societies are becoming more diverse, are our friendships too, or do “birds of a feather [still] flock together”? What can we learn from friendships across geographical or national boundaries? What do friendships tell us about digitally-mediated social worlds? How may friendships play into the harms that create the climate-crisis or enable pro-environmental activism? We welcome papers from researchers across career stages working within sociology, anthropology, social policy, social work, human/social geography and associated fields that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Researching friendship
• Beyond Eurocentrism – alternative approaches to understanding friendship
• The cultural devaluation of friendship
• Friendship across boundaries – class, gender, sexuality, age/generation, race/ethnicity
• Transnational friendships
• Digitally-mediated friendships
• Long-term or lifelong friendships
• Friendship rupture or breakdown
• Rekindled friendships
• Friendship and activism
• Friendship and the environment
• Friendship, displacement and conflict
• Friendship and care
• Friendship and food
• Friendship and death

Submission

Please submit your abstract of up to 250-300 words by Midnight (BST) on 8 November 2024 at the link below:

Submit Abstract (Microsoft Forms)

Our expectation is that the abstract will include details of the research undertaken. Presentations will be 15-20 minutes long with additional time for questions. We will consider requests for online presentations, especially from early career contributors based in the Global South. Queries can be sent to: Shruti.Chaudhry@ed.ac.uk

Venue

The workshop will be held on 1 and 2 April 2025 in Room 1.60, Edinburgh Futures Institute, The University of Edinburgh.

Workshop Organisers

Professor Lynn Jamieson, Professor of Sociology of Families and Relationships and founding co-director of CRFR, University of Edinburgh

Dr Shruti Chaudhry, Chancellor’s Fellow in sociology and co-director of CRFR, University of Edinburgh.

Chandreyee Goswami, doctoral researcher in social anthropology, University of Edinburgh.