Sober Sociability: How non-drinking students navigate outside the norm

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.