Friendship is fascinating. It can be wonderful and supportive, yet also fraught and hurtful. It exists across generations, and in all aspects of society, and understanding it more fully is the aim of a new book that StFX sociology professor Dr. Peter Mallory is currently co-editing.
Thanks to a successful SSHRC Connection Grant, Dr. Mallory, with colleague and spouse, Dr. Laura Eramian, an anthropologist at Dalhousie University, co-hosted a network of Canadian and international friendship scholars in May in Halifax to work on the upcoming book, Critical Friendship in the Modern World, to be published by Cambridge University Press. The researchers are building understandings of the critical place of modern friendship in pressing social issues, such as social connection/isolation and the changing nature of personal communities.
Dr. Mallory says each of the 15 workshop participants, all chapter authors and all in various career stages from senior scholars to grad students, sent in chapter drafts in advance. Everyone arrived with prepared comments on each other’s chapters. Instead of standard conference presentations, they devoted their time to exchange and feedback on how to strengthen each other’s work.
“It was an amazing intellectual experience,” say Dr. Mallory. “It was two full days of talented people helping each other do better scholarship.
“It will end up a stronger book as a result.”
Part-time sociology instructor and alumnus Evan Curley was hired to take discussion notes, and they invited graduate students to chair sessions, including 2025 StFX sociology graduate and Bachelor of Arts University Gold Medal recipient, Kaylee Cox.
Dr. Mallory says for the graduate students it’s a great experience to see what researchers do and to see the generosity of colleagues as they learn from each other.
Dr. Mallory, who teaches a fourth year course at StFX, Friendship and Personal Life, and who has long studied friendship in its different aspects, says the subject of friendship takes you into all these interesting areas.
Friendship is often romanticized and idealized and there is a tendency, he notes, to see it as something positive. But it also has the capacity to cause difficulty and problems. It can also be taken for granted and easily overlooked. In the upcoming book, Dr. Mallory and Dr. Eramian want to provide a richer understanding of what friendship means in the modern world. As social scientists, they’re working to develop a new approach to studying friendship and to help show why it matters in life and society.
Dr. Mallory also had a recent article on friendlessness and loneliness published in The Conversation, as well as a new book chapter, “Friendship and the Civil Sphere: Convergences, Intrusions, and Contradictions” in The Civil Sphere in Canada.
