Commentary
Unsettling friendship and using friendship to unsettle
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10859480 |
|---|---|
| Authors | H Ghorashi (0000-0003-0157-7525, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 655-661 |
| Publication date | 2018-02-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Urban Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0042-0980 • E-ISSN: 1360-063X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0042098017730543 |
| PMID | 30369646 |
| OpenAlex | W2758474071 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 26 |
Since the early 2000s there has been an undeniable global escalation of negative othering discourses concerning migrants and refugees. The fixation on ethnic difference in these discourses blinds us toward possible sources of connection. To unsettle this essentialist discourse of othering, we need to consider practices that denormalise the taken-for-granted taxonomies of the Self and the Other at their cores and rethink conditions for connection. Urban relational initiatives, experiences and narrations could provide interesting perspectives for exploring new possibilities for connection in liquid modern times, where old-fashioned collective categories lost their function. A multilayered, non-centric, non-celebratory approach of friendship as an empirical and conceptual frame provides a refreshing angle for capturing the multiplicity of everyday urban interactions. The contributions to this special issue provide insights toward enlarging our imaginings of the myriad ways that friendship as a concept and an empirical reality is enabling and constraining relationality in diverse urban settings. Here, I also argue for the importance of ‘unusual’ friendships and their potential to unsettle normalised practices of othering, thereby producing new narratives of connections in a variety of urban settings. All these small yet significant acts of friendship might be either ‘chained’ strategically to promote a collective alternative to normalised practices or ‘chained’ in an invisible manner, serving as existing subtle and modest struggles in imagining social change
Friendship · Sociology · Homelessness and Social Issues · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology · Social Psychology
The third way
Eurostars and Eurocities
Responsibility and Global Justice
Inclusion and Democracy
Inclusion and Democracy
Talking to Strangers
The Epistemology of Resistance
Gender Trouble
Giving Silence a Chance
Friendship fears and communities of convenience in Africa’s urban estuaries
Between ‘face’ and ‘faceless’ relationships in China’s public places
Youthful socialities in Australia’s urban multiculture
Distant friends and intimate strangers
Friendship networks and encounters in student-migrants’ negotiations of translocal subjectivity
Tentative friendships among low-income migrants in São Paulo’s commercial districts
Friendship in a ‘Russian bar’ in London
Friendship, curiosity and the city
Re-framing the creative city
Moving beyond the Janus Face of Integration and Diversity Discourses
Civic Sociology
Super-diversity and its implications
Negotiating belonging beyond rootedness
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |