Edinburgh Napier University

  Friendship gained across years some traction in kinship research, recently especially within the ‘queer kinship’ debates, as a strong manifestation for the need and drive of alternative ‘families of choice’. With this presentation I want to focus on a methodology in researching friendships, especially researcher’s own networks of friendships.
I start with the auto-ethnographic and biographical insights to offer a number of hypothetical vignettes as a debate stimulus. I hope to explore a number of real and imaginary stories of researching friends, researching with friends, researching friendship – to consider how the researcher may navigate the research process that involves their own friendships.