In Praise of ‘Casual’ Friendship
By Ben Davies
Academics, especially early in our careers, move around quite a lot. Having done my PhD in London, I have also lived or worked in Leeds, Liverpool, Oxford, and rural Pennsylvania; I am far from the most well-travelled academic I know. In many cases, when we arrive at a new job, we know that it is likely to only last a short period, perhaps less than a year.
This blog post isn’t about how hard it is to be an academic (though there are plenty of real problems that arise from the precarity in which many early career researchers find themselves). Instead, I want to consider something which all this moving around necessitates: casual friendship.