The category of friendship called “friends and fun” popularized via gay sex/dating apps captures a pre-existing reality among queer people around the world: that friendships include a continuum of sexual, romantic, and sentimental affects and practices. In Beirut, this category takes on specific utility amidst power relations that define (un)acceptable ways for embodying intimate relations: it enables queer men to conceal their intimacies by adjusting their behaviors to suit the norms of male–male friendship. As queer men move their relationships from the privacy of the bedroom to the publicness of the street, they act like friends while holding contrasting sexual and romantic affects under the surface of these embodied practices. The chapter argues that “friends and fun” derives its meaning from the practices men undertake as an embodied response to the sexual and gendered exigencies of public space, thus showing how friendship practices and categories do not merely challenge, but also shore up power relations.

Friendship in the workplace is alternately approached as a resource to be leveraged or a liability to be managed. In leadership development, where practitioners carefully cultivate their subjectivities, appearing adequately self-aware and open-minded is valued highly. How do leadership development practitioners’ use of complaints in their workplace, in ways both formal and informal, serve as an affordance for friendship? Considering this example raises questions about what it means to make friendship useful at work and in other contexts, and it suggests that separating the “goods” of friendship from the “bads” is a misleading and problematic endeavor.

Chronological age is a common feature in the organization of North American society. From institutional to everyday spaces and our cultural practices of association within these spaces, age segregation is the norm. Yet, intergenerationality persists in its various forms. One such space in which intergenerationality occurs is the skatepark, and one such form is that of organic intergenerational friendships forged between youth and adults. In this study, the phenomenon is explored through data gathered from eighteen semi-structured, on-site interviews with twenty participants at a skatepark in a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through these interviews, three main themes are identified: (1) making intergenerational friends at the skatepark, (2) practices of youth-adult intergenerational friendship, and (3) perceptions of youth-adult intergenerational friendship. These three themes contribute to the overall argument of the chapter that youth-adult intergenerational friendships simultaneously disrupt boundaries and patterns of age/generational differences in friendship while also reinforcing such differences in both subtle and explicit ways.

This chapter begins with the perspective that subject matter experts have failed to be public with their definitions of psychopathy, and as a consequence, the general public has a limited understanding of psychopathy as a clinical construct. This chapter describes the origins of the term psychopathy and the nonlinear path that has been taken to establish contemporary definitions of this construct. The chapter outlines four key perspectives of psychopathy: Cleckley’s perspective, the triarchic model of psychopathy, the comprehensive assessment of psychopathy personality, and the view of psychopathy traits as extreme manifestations of general personality traits. The goal is not to convince readers which perspective they should adopt, but rather to help clarify similarities and differences so that the meaning of psychopathy can be more readily understood depending on the context in which it is being used. Indeed, different contemporary perspectives on psychopathy tend to share in common the view that core psychopathy traits emerge from interpersonal, affective, and behavioural domains of functioning.

Even as friendship carries overwhelmingly positive connotations, the categories of “fair-weather friend” or “frenemy” indicate that less-than-ideal friendship is commonplace. What remains poorly understood is how people make sense of the persistence of their imperfect friendships. Drawing on studies of difficult friendships and friends who cohabitate, this chapter offers an interpretive perspective on how and why friendships that people characterize as difficult persist. Using the concept of the “good enough friend,” we unsettle ubiquitous yet simplistic directives of modern therapeutic culture to “cut off” difficult relationships. We argue that the potential for ease and difficulty are equally inherent to what friendship is, and that by attending to “difficult” ones and how people evaluate their worth, we can better understand how people navigate concord and conflict in personal life. We advance the intervention that a critical friendship must resist hierarchies of intimacy inherited from Western philosophical traditions that rank easy, pleasurable friendships as inherently “better” than ambivalent ones, which may also have core places in people’s lives.

The afterword synthesizes the chapters in this volume to draw out themes, lessons, and future directions and acknowledges the importance of the ethnographic approach of this work. We expand on the three themes of ideals in tension with practices, the shifting nature of acquaintanceship to friendship, and the enactment of public and private across space and place. We argue for three valuable insights gained from reading these chapters together. First, they point towards the importance of how people read our intentions, friendship performances, and relationships. Second, friendships impinge on our ontological security. Third, there are rhythms to connections across space. Interactions are temporally bound and accounting for the temporal is helpful in completing analyses of friendships. Ultimately, we show how these chapters sit at the intersection of critical theory and symbolic interaction. We also underscore that this volume marks not the end, but a beginning of a renewed research agenda on critical friendship, one that began with contributors who were mostly strangers but who are now mostly friends.

Quality data are necessary to test research questions about psychopathy. This chapter describes the research design of the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study (ISVYOS). The ISVYOS was initiated in 1998 and has been ongoing ever since. In this chapter I describe the ISVYOS that was used in the book, procedures for interviewing youth and collecting data in adulthood, control variables that were accounted for in the different analyses in this book, and the different measures of psychopathy that were available. This book focuses on 535 incarcerated youth who received an interview and rating on the PCL:YV. Many of these youth received psychopathy assessments using additional measures. To give readers a better sense of how psychopathy manifests in youth, I describe procedures for rating the PCL:YV and discuss and interpret different responses that youth provided that were used as indications of the presence of specific psychopathy traits. This includes describing manifestations of each item from the Interpersonal, Affective, and Lifestyle factors from the PCL:YV.

Friendship is largely perceived as a private and highly positive relationship. By interrogating friendship performances undertaken by girls at school and on social media, this chapter illuminates the public and critical aspects of friendship. I draw on performative theory and the sociology of personal life to analyze data from two ethnographic studies, one conducted with girls in an elementary school in Israel and the other conducted with girls in an antiracist youth work organization in Scotland. I analyze the aims, content, and outcomes of friendship performances as well as the contexts that shape them. I argue that successful friendship performances strengthen and validate these relationships, especially in socially intensive settings, while failed performances reflect and lead to friendship difficulties and breakdowns. Moreover, as friendship is relatively uninstitutionalized and its obligations unclear, publicly performing friendship enables individuals to elucidate their desired friendship characteristics and try to live up to their demands.

This contribution to understanding friendship as a distinct social relationship examines the distinction between friendship dyads and groups of friends by focusing on the communicative dynamics of intimacy and discretion. Drawing on the work of Simmel and Luhmann, I argue that dyadic friendship supports intimate communication characterized by immediacy, mutual disclosure, and the suspension of self-consciousness. The addition of a third party, however, shifts interaction into public mode, requiring increased discretion and greater communicative management. I offer a formal account of how the number of participants alters the quality of interaction and suggest that while intimacy is not a constant feature of friendship, it nevertheless remains a constitutive potential. To conclude, I argue that groups of friends can be intimate social formations only insofar as endogenous, “private” dyadic bonds are formed.

The focus of this chapter is on the relationship between psychopathy traits in adolescence and persistent involvement in offending through adulthood. Too often, research on psychopathy has restricted itself to very simplistic measures of offending outcomes. For example, recidivism reflects whether or not someone reoffends. However, some people reoffend dozens of times, and others only once. I used generalized estimating equations to measure repeated offending at each year of age beginning at age eighteen and continuing for over twenty years. Regardless of whether psychopathy was represented by PCL:YV total scores, four-factor model scores, or three-factor model scores, higher scores significantly increased the likelihood of persistent offending. However, this relationship was far from perfect; some people who scored high on the PCL:YV did not continue to offend at a high rate in adulthood. I use case study data to qualitatively explore why this may have been the case.