Sober Sociability: How non-drinking students navigate outside the norm
Loading...
Date
Authors
Block, Beau
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Drinking culture on campuses has been written about for decades, and drinking students see drinking culture as a means of forming and maintaining friendships, socializing in large groups and vital in their university experience. Non-drinking university students are left out of drinking literature, in turn, leaving them out of drinking discourse. I bring non-drinkers’ voices to the forefront by conducting nine semi-structured interviews with them. Through these interviews I answer the following research questions: how do Dalhousie students who do not drink feel about the drinking culture on university campuses? And what effect do they feel non-drinking has on their ability to form meaningful social circles and relationships? After thematically analyzing my data, I found that the marginalization of non-drinkers is a social process, not an internal feeling possessed by non-drinkers. Nevertheless, non-drinkers do have roles to play in drinking cultures, such as the ‘mother’ who protects drunk friends and the storyteller who remembers what others do not; they do not associate having a good time and forming friendships with drinking alcohol.
Description
Sociology Honours Thesis, 2023