Growing up, moving out, going on: Im/mobilities and youth transitions in the un/making of friendships

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines what we term the ‘un/making’ of friendships: the complex, sometimes non-linear ways in which friendships start, are maintained (or not) and break down (or not). In doing so we seek to open out some of these complexities and explore how they interact with the form of these relationships. Drawing on repeat, in-depth interviews and ethnography with a friendship group of young people in rural community in the English Midlands, this paper theorizes the un/making of friendships through an exploration of young people’s im/mobilities, their emotional attachments and responses to their friendships, and the ways in which their friendships are made, developed, sustained, fractured, and repaired as young people grow up/go on through transitions to adulthood. In doing so, the paper combines and contributes to literatures on geographies of friendships, youthful transitions and temporalities, and im/mobilities, principally through its theorization and exemplification of the ‘un/making’ of friendships.