Ystävyys tilallisen kiinnittymisen suuntaajana

Tilateoreettisia tulkintoja lasten ja nuorten ystävyyksistä

Abstract

Due to increasing physical and virtual movement, people’s social engagements have broadened from regionally
bound local communities to networked and fluid communities that traverse translocally as well as
transnationally. This development has turned friendship into one of the most important forms of sociability.
Especially in the lives of children and young people, friends are considered as a central source of support,
control and togetherness. This paper introduces a theoretical framework for geographies of friendship,
following the trail proposed by Bunnell et al. (2011) in their seminal paper in Progress in Human Geography.
The empirical study contextualizes the approach to Finnish school kids’ lived worlds, disclosing their
friendships as spatially situated and experientially placed. The key findings from the analysis fall under three
themes, resonating with and adding on to Bunnell et al.’s framework: friendship as means of togetherness
(affective relations); friendship as a source of differentiation (relative equality and difference); and the potential
of friendship in borders crossings (mobility). In all these, the active presence of children and youth
is recognized, yet not in terms of free agency but as conditioned by their lived realities. In conclusion, the
paper stresses the potential of theoretically informed empirically grounded research on friendships as one
way of better understanding the contemporary change in communality.