In a world beset by an epidemic of loneliness, it’s become a truism that friendship is an invaluable resource. Friends can be supporters, challengers, witnesses, intimate allies who expand and deepen a person’s sense of connection beyond what’s possible for family alone. But what if friendship were understood not just on an individual, personal level, but as something political – a radical practice capable of upending hierarchies and producing revolutionary social change?
In this episode, Marybeth Hamilton is joined by Laura Forster and Joel White to discuss their new book Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities. The book explores the possibilities that friendship holds for creating political transformation at an everyday level, an argument it bolsters through interviews and wide-ranging historical case studies. In this conversation they set the writing of the book in context, and they reflect on the power friendship has exerted as a form of radical political belonging – and on the value of understanding its potency as a transformative political resource.
