Displaying intimate friendships: Chinese children’s practices of friendships at school

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Displaying intimate friendships: Chinese children’s practices of friendships at school

Zhu, Yan; (2020) Displaying intimate friendships: Chinese children’s practices of friendships at school. Families, Relationships and Societies , 11 (2) pp. 1-16. 10.1332/204674320x16047229586741. Green open access

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Abstract

Through an intensive ethnographic fieldwork, this project explores rural Chinese children’s understandings and experiences of peer friendships at school. When talking about ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’, children tended to brag that they were friends with many peers, but at the same time to particularly highlight a very small number of peers as the most intimate friends, in other words, their ‘best friends’. Inspired by Finch’s concept of ‘display’, this article explores how these Chinese children used different approaches to highlight their intimate friends’ particularity in intimate friendship displays at school. This article, first, unpacks three commonly used approaches in these children’s displays of intimate friendships: 1) building up an exclusionary ‘intimate friends only’ policy; 2) imparting to certain objects, actions and language sentimental and specific meanings as ‘tokens’ of their friendship; and 3) giving ‘priority’ to intimate friends. Second, it discusses the importance of audiences and cooperation between actors in intimate friendship displays.

Type:	Article
Title:	Displaying intimate friendships: Chinese children’s practices of friendships at school
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI:	10.1332/204674320x16047229586741
Publisher version:	https://doi.org/10.1332/204674320X16047229586741
Language:	English
Additional information:	This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords:	friendship; children; intimacy; display; rural Chinese; school
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10171102