This research and publications project
seeks to explore issues of persons and friendship in the varying contexts
of modern life and across a range of critical, contextual
and cultural perspectives. Seeking to encourage innovative, creative,
inter, multi and post disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers
from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to
understand what it is to be a person and what it means for persons
to stand in individual, group, social, national and international
relationships.
Among the themes which the project will seek to explore are;
1. Changes in marriage, kinship and family
2. The place of Friendship
in an impersonal society.
3. Friends, foes, and strangers
4. The influence
of the media and technology.
5. How neighbours become friends; how
neighbours become enemies
6. Friendship and love. Changing patterns
of intimacy. Intimacy overload and disappointment.
7. Friendship as
a relation free of constitutional linkage. Friendship versus spheres
of claim, e.g. family, peer groups, community and class
8. Friendships
in childhood
9. The loneliness of suburban wives; modern society as
a lonely society; evidence of surveys, agony columns etc
10. Analysis
of the contemporary language of friendship: ‘partners’ , ‘companions’, ‘significant
others’. Does Friendship feature in these relationships?
11. Friendship and social forms - cronyism, patronism;
gang membership; being a colleague and the loss of collegiality
12. Is Friendship a morally
privileged relationship? Nepotism and the obligation
to be impartial. Distinctions between amicitia,
eros, and agape in different periods of time
13. Civic friendship and justice
14. Friendships between nations and states
These are indicative themes; as the project develops, further areas of research will be added for exploration and examination.