Sympathy exchange and the making of soulmate friendships

This article, by Kim Sune Jepsen, Department of Sociologi, University of Copenhagen and Poul Poder, Associate professor, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, examines how friendship among adolescents with hearing loss is shaped by everyday interactional processes and socio spatial environments. Drawing on interviews with 15 adolescents in Denmark, we compare their experiences in mainstream schools with those in a specialised boarding school.

We develop a micro sociological framework that integrates Clark’s concept of sympathy exchange with Layder’s notion of locales to explain how friendship outcomes emerge. Our analysis shows that in mainstream schools, limited and noisy locales constrained opportunities for reciprocal understanding, leading many adolescents to rely on passing strategies and resulting in fragile or estranged peer relations. In contrast, the boarding school offered a plurality of “slow” and “fast” locales, enabling flexible and voluntary participation, recognition of impairment, and the formation of intimate soulmate friendships alongside wider peer belonging.

The study makes three theoretical contributions. Firstly, it extends the social model of disability by demonstrating how hearing loss becomes disabling through micro level interaction barriers to sympathy exchange. Secondly and more significantly, it advances the sociology of friendship by conceptualising soulmate ties as accomplishments of interactional sympathy exchange rather than spontaneous affinities. Thirdly, it integrates theories of interaction and space to show how locales enable or disable sympathy exchange of mutual attention, recognition, and intimacy, all facilitating bonds of friendship.

These findings have practical implications for school design and policy: creating diverse and accessible locales can support not only students with disabilities but also the wider peer community in developing meaningful friendships.

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