‘DOING’ FRIENDSHIP AT A DISTANCE: SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY EXCHANGE STUDENTS AND MORE-THAN-REPRESENTATIONAL POSTCARDS

Abstract

A substantial number of university students in Singapore participate in student exchange programmes. In their sojourns, newer communication technologies are often used as a way to maintain their friendships with friends back in Singapore. Yet, postcards are still sent back home despite the presence of newer technologies that similarly serve the communicative function at an even faster speed. While they have been a tool of communication since their inception, there has been a conspicuous dearth of studies on postcards in relation to the maintenance of social relations at a distance. This thesis seeks to interrogate the phenomenon of postcards usage in the maintenance of friendship in an era of intensified mobility and connectivity, with a focus on the friendship between Singapore university students on exchange abroad and their friends ‘back home’. Using a more-than-representational approach, this thesis is an empirical and a conceptual contribution to the growing literature on friendship studies in geography, focusing on the emotional geographies of friendship at a distance. It seeks to address how and where friendship is done at a distance through the practice of sending and receiving postcards. This thesis argues that postcards are more-than-representational entities in that they have effects on and affects friends produced by the emotional work (i.e. the practice of sending and receiving postcards). Secondly, it argues that following and hence uncovering postcards’ ‘hidden’ social lives shed light on friendship at a distance as constituted by the spatiality of non-geographically-proximate ‘togetherness’, which is in turn explained in affectual, emotional and memorial terms. Lastly, it proposes for ‘memory’ to be incorporated as a concept alongside ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ to further understandings of the geographies of friendship.