"How you make friends in Finland" : An intersectional analysis of friendship formation in adulthood

Abstract: The present thesis explores how people’s gender with its various intersections shape theirexperiences of making friends in adulthood in the Finnish context and presents anintersectional analysis of the processes and challenges of making friends. The intersections Ifocused on were those of gender with ethnicity, race, religion and migrant or non-migrantstatus. Additionally, it discusses how the decolonial concepts of “world”-travelling anddiatopical hermeneutics can be used to explore how making friends could become easier. Thedata was collected through two focus group discussions with participants I recruited at anevent which provides a space for people of various backgrounds to meet people and makefriends. The research shows that making friends requires conscious effort and the challengesfor people who inhabit certain intersections can be bigger than for others. There are manybarriers that need to disappear for friendship formation to become easier, and that can happenby challenging our own prejudice and having an open mind. Making friends requires us to beable to travel to others’ “worlds” and welcome them to our own, which can only becomepossible if we encounter people that are different to us without prejudice. Meeting andlistening to each other is key to making friends, while also education from a young age maybe the key to combat and most importantly prevent discrimination and promote positiverelationships between people of different backgrounds.