Introduction

The introduction to this volume advances its collective research agenda of renewing and advancing critical approaches to friendship and modern personal life. It outlines what a critical approach to friendship entails and delineates three central themes underlying debates in the social science literature on friendship: ideals, choice, and contexts. It both consolidates these debates and offers new directions for advancing them through a series of key interventions in critical approaches to friendship. These interventions are divided into the core thematic sections of the book: (1) critical intimacies, differences, and ruptures; (2) critical sociabilities beyond the private; and (3) critical relational junctures. The introduction also elucidates the thematic cohesion of the volume, emphasizing how the chapters are united by a commitment to ethnographic methods, interpretive theoretical approaches, and critical theory.