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

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.

Resumen

Este artículo examina lo que llamamos “deshacer/hacer” de amistades: las formas complejas, a veces no lineales, en las que las amistades comienzan, se mantienen (o no) y se rompen (o no). Basándose en repetidas entrevistas en profundidad y etnografía con un grupo de amigos de jóvenes de la Inglaterra rural, este artículo teoriza cómo deshacer amistades a través de una exploración de las inmovilidades de los jóvenes, sus apegos emocionales y sus respuestas a sus amistades, y cómo las amistades fracturan, y como crean a medida que los jóvenes crecen/avanzan a través de transiciones a la edad adulta. Al hacerlo, el artículo combina y contribuye a la literatura sobre geografías de las amistades, transiciones y temporalidades juveniles e inmovilidades, principalmente a través de su teorización y ejemplificación de la “deshacer/hacer” de las amistades.

Résumé

Cet article se penche sur ce que nous appelons la (dé)-construction des amitiés: les façons complexes et quelquefois non linéaires par lesquelles les amitiés commencent, sont cultivées (ou non), et se rompent (ou non). Cet article repose sur une étude ethnographique et des entretiens approfondis et répétés avec un groupe de jeunes amis vivant dans la campagne anglaise. Il théorise la (dé)-fabrication de l’amitié par le biais d’une étude sur les (im)-mobilités des jeunes, leurs liens affectifs et leurs réponses concernant leurs amitiés, y compris comment ces dernières se terminent ou se tiennent pendant qu’ils grandissent et commencent leur transition vers le monde adulte. Ce faisant, l’article contribue, tout en les combinant, aux travaux sur la géographie de l’amitié, les transitions et les temporalités de la jeunesse, et les (im)-mobilités, surtout par sa théorie et son illustration de la « (dé)-fabrication d’amitiés.

KEYWORDS:

• Geographies of young people
• emotions
• ongoingness
• peer groups
• rural

MOTS CLEFS:

• Géographie de la jeunesse
• émotions
• continuité
• groupes de pairs
• vie à la campagne

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Geografías de los jóvenes
• emociones
• permanencia
• grupo de amistades
• rural

Introduction

As young people move through their teenage years, friendships can be both vital sources of support and solidarity, and intense foci for anxiety. Some young people come to rely on their friends as much as or more than their families: they may form networks that enable them to cope with, if not succeed, at school or at work; they may afford opportunities for fun, relaxation, enjoyment and release; and, conversely, friendships may also involve concerns about or pressure to engage in particular activities that both adults and young people themselves deem ‘negative’ – from mental health problems associated with social media (Décieux et al., 2019), to alcohol and substance (mis)use (MacLean, 2016).

Without seeking to judge the different functions of young people’s friendships, this paper seeks to open out some of the complexities that characterize the form of those relationships. Its key contribution to literatures on geographies of friendship and youth (transition) is to develop an approach to what we term the un/making of friendships that better attends to how friendships are made, sustained, fractured and/or repaired over time and space. It draws together and develops conceptual resources from literatures on friendships, young people’s im/mobilities, the (un)doing of the family, and geographies of childhood and youth. In so doing, it outlines and exemplifies an approach to young people’s friendships that foregrounds the role of emotions (particularly nostalgia), of movements (not only around but away from a particular place) and temporalities (in the sense of lives messily and inchoately ‘going on’, not simply ‘growing up’). With scholarship about friendships and youth transitions being persistent but somewhat under-represented concerns in social and cultural geographies, particularly outside institutionalized contexts like schools (Bunnell et al., 2012; Read et al., 2020; Valentine, 2003; Worth, 2009) we argue that the dynamic, complex, sometimes fragmented and often contentious nature of the friendships presented in this paper offers insights into the spatio-temporal ongoingness of social relations (Horton & Kraftl, 2006). Moreover, in distinction with previous scholarship on (young people’s) friendships, we argue for a need to view friendships in terms of their intrinsic value and functioning – not only as an enabler or barrier to other facets of life, such as work or education.

Our analyses are based on a 16-month ethnographic study with young people in a rural community in the English Midlands, where we worked in-depth with 25 young people aged 16–25. The next section reviews and brings together literatures on (geographies of) friendship, youth transition, youth im/mobilities and the (un)doing of family. After outlining our methodology, the paper develops key analytical and conceptual frames on the basis of our research with young people, focusing on the role of im/mobilities, emotions and notions of growing up/going on. We conclude by indicating how our approach could inform further work on the geographies of youth, friendships and transitions.

Literature review

Interdisciplinary literatures on friendship and young people have developed in several directions in recent years. A key development has been critical exploration of the relationship between friendship and a range of broad themes, processes and societal concerns, including: social media (Décieux et al., 2019); the impact of friendships on drug (Foster & Spencer, 2013), alcohol (MacLean, 2016) and nicotine use (McKeganey & Barnard, 2018); friendships of young people with protected characteristics (Cherng et al., 2014; Garolera et al., 2021; Mastari et al., 2022); and, young people’s friendships whilst navigating long-term health conditions or the care system (Sen, 2016; Skovdal & Ogutu, 2012).

Of significance to social and cultural geographers is that a good proportion of the above work, and of other research on young people’s friendships, is contextualized by institutions such as schools. Indeed, what is often termed the ‘social construction’ of childhood and youth is in many cases the institutionalisation of young people’s (spatial) lives – whether in school, in care settings, or other institutions (Disney & Schliehe, 2019). Sharpening this critique further, Read et al. (2020), who explore friendships on university campuses, note not only that friendship is an under-researched area of young people’s lives, but that what research does exist focuses on school-based-friendships of young people rather than other areas of life (for further examples of the former, see O’Rourke et al., 2019; Wiggins, 2018).

Turning to geographical research explicitly, a key inspiration for work on the geographies of friendship – and indeed for this paper – is Bunnell et al. (2012) agenda-setting paper. Bunnell et al. (2012) consider three areas of research: emotional and affective geographies; children’s and young people’s geographies; and, geographies of mobilities. These strands are of clear significance to our analysis. On one hand, we further specify what a consideration of emotions, youth and mobilities might mean for friendships as these three concerns combine in the doing of friendships by young people. We look at how nostalgia, youth transitions and senses of ‘going on’, and movements around and beyond shared community space combine in expressions and experiences of friendship that are variegated by age, gender and more besides. On the other hand, and using these three strands as a springboard, we seek to complicate geographical scholarship on friendship by looking at the spatio-temporal processes and practices involved in the un/making of friendships. As friends come and go – literally and figuratively – we delve more deeply into the tensions, ambivalences and dis/continuities of social lives. We explore a little later how we might borrow from and develop approaches to the un/doing of family in opening out these analyses.

Bunnell et al’.s paper has been influential – particularly as friendship has become – alongside families and more formal institutions – a key consideration for how individuals and groups cope with pressing challenges such as those surrounding health (Andrews et al., 2014), education (Holton, 2017), and austerity (Hall, 2019). These are vital concerns, all of which at least frame our current paper. Yet – to generalize – they also tend to view friendship as something that operates in relation to such challenges – for instance as a mitigation, coping strategy, or enabler. By contrast, this paper places friendships front and centre as intrinsically important; we ask what enables or constrains friendships themselves, why and how they matter, profoundly, to young people when they are un/made, and how they feel (Hunter et al., 2016).

Certainly, there exist previous geographical studies of young people’s friendships and wider peer relations – again often in institutionalized settings (Ralph & Levinson, 2019; Skelton, 2000; Thomas, 2009). Moreover, friendships have been shown to be central to young people’s socio-spatial identities and their interactions with one another and adults – particularly in public spaces and in the lives of street-dwelling youth (P. E. Hopkins, 2013; Tucker, 2003; Van Blerk, 2012). However, interestingly, ‘friendship’ is not always articulated explicitly in such research (nor must it be, of course), in concerns with related issues such as ‘belonging’ (Van Buggenhout, 2020) or ‘citizenship’ (van Blerk et al., 2020). Elsewhere geographical scholarship on young people’s friendship tends again to approach friendships extrinsically – for instance as a key factor in the development of children’s political identities (Kallio & Häkli, 2015) or environmental agency (Skovdal & Benwell, 2021).

Beyond the above kinds of approaches, we would also observe that geographers have yet to fully engage with Bunnell et al. (2012) critique that research on children and young people’s friendships remains neglected, with significant further potential for research that engages with the subdiscipline(s) of children’s and young people’s geographies. Although there is not space to review these larger literatures in depth here, we would nonetheless signpost that this paper builds on rich work on youth transitions and, especially, children and young people’s mobilities, as follows.

In terms of youth transitions, geographers have – along with a much wider group of scholars in youth studies – examined the challenging, often complex ways in which young people in different geographical and social contexts navigate paths to adulthood (Valentine, 2003; Worth, 2009, 2019). As part of a turn towards relational geographies of age (P. Hopkins & Pain, 2007), more ‘traditional’, straightforward markers of the transition to adulthood – such as having children or owning a home – have been questioned. On one hand, such markers make problematic (for instance, Western, heteronormative and middle class) assumptions about what ‘should’ determine adulthood (DiFeliciantonio & Dagkouly-Kyriakoglou, 2022; Hall, 2019). On the other, the very notion of ‘transition’ itself has been critiqued and (re)theorized given the complex and messy ways in which transitions happen – for most of us – and as entangled with/in broader social, economic and political change (Brown et al., 2012). Some young people experience ‘yo-yo’ transitions – nonlinear moves ‘into’ and ‘back out of’ adulthood as, for instance, they move into/out of a house with their parents/guardians (Walther, 2006). Or, as Worth (2009) argues so importantly, experiences of becoming-older – and of future aspirations – may be uneven and contradictory, with multiple potential pathways being actualized in unforeseen ways (also Grant, 2017).

In this paper, then, we draw upon these more complex ways of theorizing youth transitions to demonstrate how socio-spatial experiences of such transitions contribute to the un/making of friendships. Following Horton and Kraftl (2006), we stress the importance of emotions and the recursive ways in which past, present and future are entangled in experiences of ongoingness. Here, ongoingness is understood as the ways in which everyday, embodied, emotional, banal, material engagements with place contribute to contradictory, non-teleological experiences of being a young person, wherein to talk of ‘transition’ of any kind is perhaps difficult. By drawing attention to the importance of nostalgia and other emotions in how young people articulated their experiences of friendship, we attend to ways in which those experiences might feel painful, hopeful or ambivalent (perhaps all at the same time).

Thus, our notion of ‘un/making’ is intended not to characterize a dualism between friendships either lost or found, created or dismantled, but the complex and multivalent ways in which those relationships are constituted and felt. Although not discussing in any depth the role of families, other than at the beginning of our analysis – and although friendship relations can be very different from those in families – we take a cue from recent geographical and sociological work on family practices (Morgan, 2011) and the un/doing of family (Walker, 2022; Wilson et al., 2012). As Murray et al. (2019, p. 2) argue, whilst families may experience smoother periods and times of disruption, ‘family is an ongoing process of change, adjustment and re-routing’. We develop these notions of un/doing and re/routing by asking how friendships might be built but especially how they develop through fractures and (the possibility of) repair.

Finally, this paper is concerned with how im/mobilities maybe central to the un/doing and re/routing of friendships (and not only how friendships may be an important aspect of the experience of im/mobilities). As we demonstrate, for older young people, these mobilities maybe multi-scalar and multi-temporal – as much about movement outside their shared community as within, and as much a consequence of seasonal, not only daily or weekly rhythms. These observations are important since within subdisciplinary children’s geographies, it is the (more micro-scale) mobilities of younger children that have dominated scholarship – albeit in diverse, vibrant research across many contexts (for recent reviews and indicative examples, see Marzi & Reimers, 2018; Wintoneak & Jobb, 2022; Zannat et al., 2022). In those literatures, key debates centre around the extent to which children’s mobilities are ‘independent’ from adults (Mikkelsen & Christensen, 2009), the ways in which mobilities are entangled with and produced by banal, everyday materialities (Cortés-Morales, 2021) and how mobilities enable or constrain children’s responses to socio-environmental challenges (van Blerk, 2016).

Given their age, older children and young people’s mobilities may be subject to both similar and distinct framings, particularly where young people become increasingly independent with age (although as with other aspects of youth transitions, such independence may not be gained in a straightforward way). Thus, some work in geography focuses on much larger spatial scales (beyond the scope of this paper) – for instance in terms of intra-European migration patterns (King, 2018) and transnational citizenship (Cheung Judge and Blazek, 2020). A smaller sub-set of that work has focused on emotional dimensions of youth mobilities – particularly how they are articulated within the future aspirations of young people (Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2016; Robertson et al., 2018).

This paper draws on the above literatures, adding empirically to studies of older young people’s mobilities. However, it also develops those literatures in two ways. Firstly, through a far more explicit analysis of the relationship between young people’s mobilities and friendships – where, in studies of youth mobilities that do reference friendships, those references are often brief and passing (e.g. Camozzi, 2022; Porter et al., 2012). Secondly, it examines the interplay of stasis and movement – of im/mobilities – as young people’s lives and friendships go on. Again, a subset of literatures has explored im/mobilities, but tended to do so at a larger scale in terms of which young people are or not able to migrate, and what are the contextual factors that prevent or enable migration (e.g. Boyd & Harada, 2022; Robertson et al., 2018). However, this paper’s contribution is to link a concern with im/mobilities to a broader consideration of the un/making young people’s friendships – and to do so with consideration of arguably more banal, but certainly more localized forms of im/mobilities.

Methodology

The data for this paper were gathered over the course of a sixteen month period, via semi structured qualitative interviews, guided walks, and ethnographic observation, with a group of 25 young people aged 15–25. In total, 40 interviews and 9 guided walks were undertaken, alongside ethnographic research involving informal conversations with additional young people not involved in interviews. The aim of this study was to explore young people’s relationships in Romsworth (a pseudonym) – a newly built, masterplanned development in a rural setting in the Midlands region of England. The data collected were fully transcribed and analysed thematically using NVivo software. Institutional ethical approval was gained and informed written consent was obtained from all young people and (where under 16) their parents/guardians. The names of participants and the community were changed to protect the identity of participants.

While on the surface, Romsworth is similar to other new housing developments in England, the land it was built on came with an interesting history. Landowners sold the land to developers with the understanding that a ‘community’ should be built there. And in fact, initial marketing for the development invited new residents to ‘come and create your own community’. Romsworth is a self-styled ‘village’ with a community centre and bar, run by residents for residents, an active residents committee, and regular ‘village’ events such as a summer fair and a bonfire party which take place over the course of the year. As we indicate, this community ideal impinged upon young people’s experiences of the un/making of friendships.

Romsworth itself is predominantly made up of white, middle class families and while the young people who took part in the study were not asked for their demographic information, they reflected the make up of the settlement. The majority of participants were white with only one young person self defining as ‘mixed-race’ during a conversation. Additionally, the young people had aspirations that would be considered ‘middle-class’, either planning on going to university or setting up their own businesses, planning to learn to drive as soon as they turned 17 and own a car as soon as possible after this.

When data were collected, there were very few 15–25 year olds living in Romsworth. Most of the young people living in the settlement knew each other, both through the size of the development and as a result of the regular community events held there. While not all of these young people knew each other well enough to call themselves ‘friends’, a group of 15, 16, and 17 year olds had developed a close friendship group, their key commonalities being that they were of a similar age living in the same place. The group was not static with some members meeting as young children and continuing this friendship into their teenage years, and others joining the group later as their families moved into the settlement (see Table 1). Significantly, these young people saw themselves in a unique position, recognizing that as Romsworth village grew and more families moved in there would be much larger numbers of young people in future generations. This paper draws on interviews conducted with six of the young people from this friendship group. Five of the six lived in the settlement, and the other lived on farmland owned by his parents that backed onto Romsworth.

Table 1. The participants who identified as a friendship ‘group’, and who form the main basis for this paper’s analyses. Age and gender information was self-reported by young people, and all names are pseudonyms.

Participant	Age	Gender	Number of interviews
Tamar	16	F	3
Adam	17	M	3 + 1 guided walk
James	16	M	3 + 1 guided walk
Ben	16	M	3
Julie	15	F	3
Jane	16	F	3

In qualitative work, there is always the challenge of interpreting what participants say and the slipperiness and intersubjectivity of emotion adds an extra dimension to this (Hadfield-Hill & Horton, 2014). However, it is exactly this ‘affective’ element of friendship that Bunnell et al. (2012) call on us to turn our attention to, and as we demonstrate through this paper, a range of complex emotions goes into the un/making of friendship. Sometimes, these emotions were clearly named and articulated by participants. At other times, these were inferred through examples, phrases or the ways in which young people intoned what they had to say (with bodily expression or tone of voice aiding such inferences). Therefore, we explore these emotions with a recognition that emotions are not always clear cut, are experienced inter-subjectively, and that in the process of discussing topics such as friendship, multiple, sometimes conflicting emotions can be at play.

The un/making of friendships

Focusing on the friendship group outlined above, the rest of this paper analyses what friendships meant to young people, focusing on the role of their im/mobilities, emotions, and the ongoingness of their lives in terms of how their friendships developed, stretched, were fractured and/or repaired: how they were un/made. It is also important to note that whilst at times friendship was an explicit focus of the research, at others, young people’s relationships with one another were woven through how they articulated their wider experiences of living in (and moving on from) Romsworth – including the making of ‘community’.

Im/Mobilities

Several young people revealed that the ‘community’ aspect of the settlement had played a part in the development of their friendships, with some meeting when they were young children as a result of their parents getting to know each other and others joining the group after community events. There was a ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005) to their relationships, resultant from them being roughly the same age and living in a small community with few other young people. One interviewee talked about this in more detail.

If you go to [nearby town], I would hang around with the same people that I am. It wouldn’t be a variety, it would just be the people that I fit in with. I don’t necessarily fit in with these lads but we have to live with it, we get on. (Tamar)

Tamar highlighted the significance of Romsworth being a newly-built and emerging community (in fact still being under construction when the research took place), and the specific im/mobilities this implied. In this case, and framing our conversations about the friendship group, it was the movements of their families to this place (Holdsworth, 2013), at roughly the same time, which underpinned their being thrown together. These ‘small stories of home moves’ (Edwards et al., 2023, p. 210) and the chance meetings with new neighbours extended into the back-stories of how this friendship group had been made. The corollary of these everyday family mobilities was the fact that the relatively small size of the population when they arrived, and its relative remoteness, meant that some young people could feel a little ‘stuck’ here (and stuck together), compared with the ways in which they perceived friendships to be developed and maintained elsewhere, as Tamar pointed out.

Tamar went on to anticipate that growth in the settlement would see a different future for later generations of young people – and, indeed, the un-making of their own friendship group.

I think it’ll kind of, it will change and they will go into their, there’ll be James group and then there’ll be my group and then there’ll be the David group. It won’t be the variety group. They’ll kind of make their own. (Tamar)

Such sentiments – which looked forward to the increasing scale of families moving into Romsworth – were echoed by others. Reflecting on the differences between incidental friendships based on proximity, and those around ‘taste’, some discussed how differences in musical tastes were collectively handled by the group so that it (broadly) cohered. Some group members told us that they took it in turn to play the music they liked to the rest of the group. Adam suggested the group, aside from James, were ‘musically oblivious’ and went on to say

I don’t listen to mainstream music … I won’t listen to it just because it’s come out this week. (Adam)

Adam and James set themselves apart from other group members although Adam also acknowledged that he did not share James’ taste in music

Erm … we … nobody likes it when James is playing his music, nobody likes it. But we also get on with James … once you know the person you rise above everything, that’s like on the front page of the stereotype. (Adam)

Adam hit on a critical point that despite their differences and the throwntogetherness of the group, they were friends because they liked each other, and their friendships were meaningful even though they were different. In fact, some went on to talk about the importance (even the necessity) of their friendship amongst the potential for things to fall apart:

Yeah, if there’s an argument, we just say, like, no just pack it in and get on and things like that. And then we’re sorry and we’ll get on again because we realise that as soon as one of us goes in [goes home] the rest of them are going to go in because it’s awkward. And there’s just no point coz we know that we need each other. (Tamar)

Tamar acknowledged that arguments occurred but rather than other group members taking sides they were more likely to diffuse the situation and try to help resolve it. Significantly – because of the situation they found themselves in – an argument had an impact on the group as a whole rather than just on those were involved in it, with Tamar expressing the likelihood that the whole group will ‘go in’ (go home) if one person does.

Paralleling work on rural youth in other contexts (Boyd & Harada, 2022; Farrugia, 2016), poor transport links to surrounding towns and villages meant limited mobility to other places became key aspects of young people’s collective lives and identities. Young people who were not old enough to drive needed to rely on lifts or on an infrequent bus service. Those who could drive or were learning to do so talked about how important this was in giving them ‘independence’. We accompanied some of the friendship group on the bus to a nearby town to experience what the young people living in the settlement felt when they tried to travel outside.

The journey to [nearest town] is timetabled to take 20 minutes, it costs £4.90 for a return and the last bus leaves [town] at 6.44pm. The journey to [more distant, larger town] is timetabled to take around 45 minutes but when I caught the bus, in the middle of the day, i.e., not during rush hour, the journey was closer to an hour. It cost £6.50 for a return and the last bus leaves [larger town] at 8.40pm. Both services run hourly Monday to Saturday with no buses through the village on a Sunday. The bus to [nearest town] was early and I only just managed to catch it whereas the bus to [larger town] was over ten minutes late. (extract from fieldwork diary)

This extract highlights some of the challenges of travelling by public transport. The nearest cinema was in the nearest town but as the last bus left the town’s bus station at 6.44 pm this often clashed with film screenings. Young people also reported irregularities in the bus timetable, with buses often running late and sometime simply not running at all. This made planning days or nights out difficult; events that were important if the group wanted to meet outside of Romsworth, and which they felt could (and should) have been important to solidifying their friendships.

Given the rather limiting im/mobilities afforded by the public transport network outside Romsworth, young people placed significant value on their friendship group. In contrast to ‘big’ planned days or nights out, they emphasized the importance of highly place-based, casual ways in which their relationships were constituted through simply being in and moving around – being im/mobile in – the community.

We all know each other so we all … there’s only about (lists names) there’s about ten/twelve of us altogether. So we can just call each other or something, see whoever’s coming out and then we’ll just walk around or stay at the field. (Adam)

Significantly, there is a sense in which the movements of these young people were seemingly arbitrary and aimless – they are ‘just walking’ (Horton et al., 2014) – but there were two key aspects to these sorts of movements. Firstly, the places the group went to were less important than the group itself – at least in terms of what they offered in a positive sense and their meaning to the group. Secondly, however, and paralleling longstanding work about intergenerational tensions in public spaces (e.g. Vanderbeck, 2007), the spaces they used were those where they felt they were less likely to be noticed, complained about, or moved on by older residents of Romsworth. As Ben highlights:

we’re away from everything, like usually we’re either inside someone’s house or over there [on the playing field]. I don’t think people usually bother if we’re over there or if we’re just walking around. (Ben)

Ben’s comments highlight the issues young people faced using the contested spaces, ensuring that they used spaces where they were unlikely to be disturbed or people would complain (perhaps a corollary of the idea of building a ‘community’). These spaces could change over time (with perceived levels of surveillance) and so rather than congregating at a particular place where they felt they belonged, they moved to multiple places where their sense of non-belonging would be least heightened. We also experienced this sense directly whilst sitting with some of the group in ‘the pond’ – an area of land at the intersection of two roads, which dips down and affords some protection from traffic noise and wind.

James, Adam and I had been sitting in the pond for some time when two elderly ladies came along. They were on the outer edge, looking in and although they didn’t speak to us, I felt a tangible sense that they were going to tell us off for being there and I noticed that none of us looked directly at them, preferring instead to keep our heads down. I have since listened back to the recording of the walk and realised that at that point, we all lowered our voices to almost a whisper as though we were trying not to be noticed (extract from fieldwork diary)

Although common experiences for many young people, our argument is that these forms of im/mobilities – moving on, keeping your head down, moving on again – were everyday, microspatial practices that helped to stitch together this friendship group. They could have been part of their un-doing – leading to frustrations as significant as the poor transport links and disagreements over musical tastes – yet offered shared experiences that could bind them together. In turn, these local im/mobilities were interwoven with the larger-scaled family mobilities that had led to their moving to this ‘community’. Although they all knew that the group was actually based on nothing more than the slightly tenuous fact of their having moved to Romsworth, the group had more-or-less remained together, with genuine friendships blossoming. In the next section we explore some of the emotions members of the group felt about their friendships.

Emotion

As we discussed in the previous section, the friendship group spent considerable time ‘hanging out’ together. This time spent together bred feelings of comfort, belonging and familiarity. Adam and Ben told us that when they had the opportunity to, most of their spare time would be spent with friends:

I get up around ten ‘o’clock, I have breakfast, get ready and I’ll spend the whole day out with friends. (Adam)

today, we’ve just had a massive breakfast at Adam’s house, like all of us. That’s where we just came from (Ben)

we do have quite a lot of parties as a group, like the whole group of us (Ben)

There is a sense of contentment in the way Ben talks here; eating together is a bonding experience but breakfast is perhaps a more intimate meal that individuals tend to share with those they live with or who are their guests (Heinonen, 2022). The comfort and ‘continuous sense of embodied, affective, practical, and sociocultural belonging’ (Nunn et al., 2022, p. 42) these young people felt in each other’s company is apparent, with both Adam and Ben using phrases like ‘the whole day’, ‘all of us’ and ‘the whole group of us’ to describe how much time they spent together and the sorts of leisure activities they enjoyed doing in a fairly routinized way.

However, while the group enjoyed spending time with each other, this did not come without tensions, characterized by different kinds and intensities of emotion. Most made reference to a specific incident which had caused a rift, and which was indicative both of the fragile nature of their friendships (despite the familiar routine depicted above), and the ways in which they were vulnerable to breaking down. This pressure point, a party at Jane’s house, caused relationships between some members of the group to fracture.

I fell out with them in May because I had a house party when my parents were away and all of that lot came over and things got broken and mum went mental at them, and if she saw them around she’d give them dirty looks and things like that. And they thought that I hated them but I don’t have a problem with them. But ever since then, my mum doesn’t like me going out with them because of what happened. Well, she said, you can still be friends with them, I just don’t want them anywhere near my house. Which is fair enough. (Julie)

Given the lack of spaces in the settlement for their age group, the homes of the group were important places to gather. This was of greater importance in bad weather or during the winter when it was too wet or cold to hang around on the street. Therefore, the rest of the group being unable to come to Julie’s house, coupled with the feeling that she herself was angry with them created a rift that saw her begin to separate from the rest of the group. Her best friend Jane took her side and also began to drift away from the group with the two of them becoming a closer unit away from the wider group.

In addition to this incident sparking a rift, gender and sexuality also played a part in Jane and Julie’s detachment from the group. This came to a head when Tamar, being relatively new to Romsworth, joined the friendship group:

Jane: It used to be me, Julie, and the boys …

Julie: … and then Tamar came along and that’s where all the tensions started” (Jane and Julie)

Jane and Julie pinpoint Tamar joining the group as a second source of significant tension. They went on to discuss how Tamar ‘went out’ with Dave, a boy Jane also liked. For Jane and Julie, Tamar transgressed unwritten (gendered) rules around how to behave when joining a group:

Julie: She thought that fitting in with the group meant taking themick out of me, that by taking the mick out of me that made the boyslike her…

Jane: …the boys used to take the micky out of me and Julie all thetime…

Julie: …but we’d stick up for each other, we wouldn’t turnagainst each other…

Jane: …I just take it and give them banter back and have banterwith them…

Julie: …she does the banter against you, the girl, instead ofagainst the boy” (Jane and Julie)

For Tamar, being part of the group meant joining in on the banter that took place, but for Jane and Julie, Tamar had tried to fit in with the boys and not with them. Jane and Julie felt her behaviour was inappropriate and were also frustrated that she had only lived in the village for ‘maybe about a year’ (Julie) but had still taken their place in the group. To some extent they perceived friendship as something that should grow over time and they blamed Tamar solely for not understanding this. Hence, emotions played at least a double role here – in Tamar’s performances of humour and ‘banter’; and in the ways in which Jane and Julie felt about these performances and their sense that ‘belonging’ to a group should take longer to achieve (De Backer & Pavoni, 2018). Again, the underlying geographies of Romsworth – the throwntogetherness of this new and fairly isolated place that had bred both comfort and a sense of fragility – were at play here, heightening Jane’s and Julie’s senses of detachment.

It became evident that the group’s friendship changed over the course of our year of fieldwork and in later interviews some of the group reflected on these changes. They experienced a range of emotions. Jane and Julie, reflected on how their friendships used to be and felt nostalgic for what they’d lost:

Jane: [Now] I mainly see them at parties or out in town and stuff butI don’t see them much in Romsworth. If I go out I’ll see themthere.

Julie: But it won’t be like a proper conversation…

Jane: …no it’s completely different to what it was a few monthsago

Julie: It’s weird to think that this time last year that used to bewhat we used to do, like every night nearly and it is sad and I domiss it”. (Jane and Julie)

Psychologists and behavioural scientists point to the ways in which rejection, ostracism, microaggressions and other forms of social exclusions can have an impact on the physical and psychological wellbeing of those experiencing it (Wesselmann et al., 2016, Mulvey et al., 2017). In these examples, Jane and Julie were experiencing exclusion from the group; it is important to note here that they saw the rest of the group as carrying on with the same sort of activities as they previously had but without the two girls present. In a similar way, as they reflected back, Tamar’s introduction into the group signified the beginning of their exclusion. In other words, Julie and Jane did not choose to no longer be part of the group, rather the group remained relatively cohesive without them as a part of it. This raised questions for the ways that in the process of un/making friendships, individuals have the potential to exclude or be excluded.

Such forms of exclusion have implications for the emotions imbricated in the un/making of friendships. Over the course of this conversation Jane and Julie reiterated how much they missed the boys, the things they used to talk about, and the activities they did together. Other members of the group also talked with some nostalgia about the gradual breaking down of some aspects of their friendships, whilst other aspects remained constant or shifted in feel over time. Others still were aware of a sense of ‘moving away’ from each other, but were either ambivalent, emotionally detached from, or even positive about these changes. These varied responses emerged not only from the kinds of ‘local’ tensions within the group highlighted above, but from changes in their priorities as they grew up and went on in their lives. The next section explores some of these responses – and continues to consider a range of emotions, in light of young people’s ‘transitions’.

Growing up/going on

In this section we explore how some of the specific tensions that we described above were recursively related to how young people were moving on (and out) of Romsworth – whether temporarily given increased levels of independent mobility and new work or study commitments, or more permanently. They expressed how the different scales and times of their lives, within and beyond Romsworth, led to conflicting senses of what it meant to grow up and go on, with/out the friendship group (Horton & Kraftl, 2006; Worth, 2009).

Ben, who lived just outside Romsworth on farmland his parents owned, had always seemed to be one of the group leaders. The other young people listened to what he had to say and he was regularly present in stories others told about the group’s antics. When we talked to him towards the end of our time in Romsworth, it became clear that he had stepped away from the group to focus on other areas of his life. Interestingly, Ben framed his reflections on these broader life changes within the more banal, everyday un-making of friendships through ‘falling out’:

Most of the Romsworth mates have fallen out now. So Sam and Dave … me and Dave don’t like Sam because he said loads of stuff about me. Me and Adam had a fall out but we’re fine now and Adam and I haven’t fallen out. Me and Tamar have fallen out as well. (Ben)

While Jane and Julie had stepped away from the group, Ben’s comments made it clear that the group had started to drift away from each other more broadly, with several members having ‘fallen out’, some no longer speaking to each other and others still in contact but at a distance. These messy, partial, synchronous, perhaps contradictory processes get at the heart of what we mean by the ‘un/making’ of friendships.

Returning to our discussion of emotions, rather than feeling the loss of these friendships, Ben was instead (at least as he articulated his experiences to us) focusing rather more pragmatically on the next phase of his life (indeed, the rather cursory, almost dispassionate listing of who had fallen out with whom in the quotation above is indicative of his attitude). At the time of the following conversation, Ben had finished school and was waiting for his GCSE results.

“I’d say at this age, you’ve finished your exams, you’re moving on with your life. Like you start to like, decide what you want to do, you’re maturing and it’s like quite a mature thing to be deciding what you wanna do in life and work and all that. (Ben)

Ben was deciding whether he wanted to go to college, begin working for a friend of his parents, or start his own business. He talks about this stage as ‘moving on’ with his life. Hence, Ben emphasized the apparently pragmatic – although still emotionally-laden – process of working through one’s aspirations for the future in ways that involve a literal and/or metaphorical sense of going on, elsewhere (Grant, 2017). Moreover, Ben’s reference to aspirations and moving on enabled him – at least in his conversations with us – to rationalize and perhaps efface the loss of friendships and a friendship group in which he had been central. Hence, the un/making of friendships can involve multiple kinds, performances and articulations of emotion – including an apparent absence of emotion.

By contrast, James and Adam talked about how their aspirations for the future were different from their friends’. They were beginning to think about the future and had both decided that they wanted to move to bigger places. Through rather cutting irony and humour, they saw themselves as different from their friends who they felt were staying where they were through fear of larger towns and cities rather than because they enjoyed living in the countryside (reinforcing a sense of the throwntogetherness, comfort and convenience we discussed in the first part of our analysis). James was planning to attend college and was contemplating university thereafter. He was very clear that if he did go to university this would be away from the place he lived, suggesting that living at home while at university is ‘boring’ (compare Evans, 2016).

“Adam: they just want to stay in the countryside their whole life

James: Because they think they’ll get stabbed in London” (conversation with Adam and James)

If I went to uni I wouldn’t like to go to [nearby town] coz I want to be away from home. Because it’s boring to go and have to come home, if you go to uni most of it is like the nightlife (James)

In comparing themselves with their friends, James and Adam invoked the ways in which all of the members of the friendship group had to literally and metaphorically ‘navigate’ both Romsworth and their perceptions of places beyond Romsworth, both near and far (Visser et al., 2022). Certainly, they felt that it was the comfort, safety, small size and familiarity of the community that was preventing some of their friends from moving on – an attitude they sought to distance themselves from.

Significantly – whether or not they had chosen not to move away – for those who felt they were left behind there was frustration that they were unable to access the same sort of lifestyle that those with disposable income and access to transport were able to. These feelings were characterized not only by nostalgia but by a sense of poignancy and frustration. Comparing ‘then and now’, Tamar indicates that:

we’d be straight out, sometimes I’ve even missed my dinner because like I’d go straight out with them because we’re all massive best friends and we all get on really well. And now, coz they all go to work, I’m just sat at home doing nothing, waiting for them to come home. (Tamar)

Here (somewhat ironically, given the split recounted above), Tamar talks with a touch of the same nostalgia Jane and Julie experienced. Although this was not about the group fracturing, this was about changing priorities for some of the group members. Again, therefore, the notion of ‘un/making’ better characterizes what was happening to these friendships.

Jane and Julie themselves went on to talk about how their friends had begun to do different activities in the evening.

Julie: they tend to go to town now, a lot more…

Jane: At night and stuff.

Julie: Like every night and I don’t really have the money rightnow”. (Julie and Jane)

Jane and Julie were a year younger than ‘the boys’ and as a result were not yet able to have part-time jobs. Again, the ‘throwntogetherness’ of this group meant that it was perhaps more diverse than other friendship groups – based for instance on year groups at school – and so at certain points, differences in age became heightened (something likely replicated in many smaller, rural communities: compare Tucker, 2003).

As young people began to explore the different avenues their lives could take it became clear that they had different priorities, all of which impacted on their friendships, and they became less close as a result. Alongside the time- and place-specific ‘sparks’ that caused particularly fallings-out, the rather longer-term drifting-apart of the group as a whole was implicated in changing priorities, aspirations and commitments beyond Romsworth. While they still saw each other around Romsworth, and some remained friends, the closeness that they had experienced in the years and months before had been un/made.

Conclusions

This paper has explored the un/making of friendships amongst a group of young people. Rather than viewing friendships as factors in or secondary to other facets of socio-spatial lives, it has turned the lens on friendships themselves. Viewing them as intrinsically important to all of us – but perhaps particularly to young people as they grapple with challenges of growing up and going on – it has examined some of the ways in which friendships are felt, practiced and emplaced. Whether through the contingencies and fortuities of coming to live in a newly-built, fairly isolated rural community, or whether in aspirations to look beyond to other places near or far, young people’s experiences and understandings of place were central to how they performed and talked about their friendships.

The first contribution of this paper has, then, been not only to critically analyse friendships as important phenomena in and of themselves, but to highlight the multiple, entwined spatio-temporal processes and scales that are involved and invoked in their un/making. Beyond the rather glib observation that further work in other contexts might build significantly on this paper by identifying other such processes and scales, we would also argue for deeper attentiveness to the other ‘actors’ constitutive of friendships, and who were rather absent from our analyses given our concern with the friendship group itself. These other actors might include family members (perhaps especially siblings, who may join or be on the edges of friendship groups), interconnections with other friendship groups (at school, work, online, or other leisure activities), and indeed non-human and multispecies actors (Hadfield-Hill & Zara, 2019). Certainly, there is significant further potential for research on the geographies of friendships to be integrated with geographical research on the family, home and on various ‘institutions’, such as schools. Similarly – taking inspiration from feminist new materialist and posthumanist scholarship in children’s geographies – there is considerable potential for further research on the un/making of friendships to witness the ways in which friendships are perhaps always constituted through more-than-human assemblages – from gifts to companion species and from experiences of eating-together to shared modes of encountering and coping with the materialities of environmental change (Horton et al., 2015; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018).

This paper’s second contribution has been to theorize and exemplify how friendships and friendship groups are un/made. Friendships are not static or dualistically ‘present/absent’, but rather in a constant state of flux and subject to multiple pressures. Friendships are dynamic, contextual, contingent, complex and may simultaneously fragment whilst they cohere. Like young people’s ‘transitions’ to adulthood, they are never ‘growing up’ towards maturity but are simply going on (Horton & Kraftl, 2006). Again, this was particularly heightened in Romsworth given the ways in which young people felt they had been ‘throwntogether’: there was a sense both of comfort and fragility in their friendships, which was indicative of just one of the many ways in which friendships may be un/made. Future scholarship on friendship could be equally sensitive to the specificities of place in examining the un/making of friendships – and particularly to how social differences, such as age and gender, may play a part. Certainly, in our paper, such differences were at times effaced given the necessity of convenience, and at others heightened given differing levels of disposable income.

This paper’s final contribution has been to demonstrate how im/mobilities, emotion and ongoiningness are recursively productive of, and produced by, the friendships of young people. Drawing on Bunnell et al. (2012), and others, it has proposed these as key analytical and conceptual frames for examining the un/making of friendships. Future scholarship may (continue to) build on these frames, whilst also drawing out other key thematics. For instance, it would be fascinating to explore in more detail how key ‘pressure points’ (such as ‘the party’) are critical moments in the lives of friendship groups, and how these are narrated and felt by different members of those groups, both immediately and in the longer-term. Relatedly, tracing the im/mobilities, emotions and ongoingness of friendship groups over the longer-term – beyond a year, as in this paper – might enable richer, more nuanced understandings of the un/making of friendships over time.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support and input of the rest of the project team: Pia Christensen, John Horton and Sophie Hadfield-Hill.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council as part of the project New Urbanisms, New Citizens [RES-062-23-1549].