Laura Eramian

Laura Eramian is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on personhood and everyday social relationships. Her current research program centres on modern friendship in Atlantic Canada, the first project in which was a collaborative study of difficult friendships and friendships that have fallen apart. She is principal investigator on a SSHRC-funded project dealing with friendship across public and private life, which focuses on friends who move in or buy property together, friends who work or start businesses together, and the lives of people with few or no friends. The goal is to understand how the place of friendship is changing in people’s lives, and how the growing cultural value placed on friendship might be related to growing anxieties around it, as people often wonder whether their friendships are “good enough.” Across these projects, Dr. Eramian is particularly interested in how people might increasingly, monitor, practice, and interpret their friendships through the cultural resources and imperatives of “therapeutic culture.”