Who Are Friends with Whom? Performative Boundary Work of Friendship in a Diverse Danish School

This chapter explores the ways that racialized differences come to matter in the process of friendship making within a diverse Danish school setting. Drawing from an ethnographic study conducted in a racially diverse school in Copenhagen, Denmark, the chapter explores how, through the practice of lunch eating, young people navigate and develop their understandings of friendships, often positioning these relationships within racialized categories. Approaching the lunch break as a daily performance of the ritual, the chapter illustrates how friendship divisions between the students establish the status quo of social ordering, in which racially minoritized students are deemed to be forming segregated friendships. Theoretically, the chapter explores the possibilities to understand friendship as a performative boundary figure. Centering the question on what friendship does rather than what friendship is the chapter conceptualizes friendship as a performative social institution that can both dismantle and construct symbolic hierarchies of group divisions and boundaries.