2nd International Symposium of Loneliness
“Pandemic and Loneliness”
2nd International Symposium of Loneliness
The first International Symposium of Loneliness took place in December 2019 under the title of “Individual, Society, and Loneliness”. This year, 2nd International Symposium of Loneliness will be held entitled as “Pandemic and Loneliness”. By the year 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic has put humankind into an unfamiliar process of compulsory isolation and caused us to lose our initiatives in our lives. While the process is still going on, many factors such as the experiences up to now, emotional states that have emerged-lost-transformed, changes in the public and private sphere, political and economic uncertainties-anxieties-reactions, alterations in the perception of time and space, rise and falls, and so on demonstrate the significance that the phenomenon of Pandemic and how it is being experienced need to be opened for discussion. From another angle, it can be said that the process itself necessitates certain discussions and leaves no other need or solution but the effort to develop insight and foresight concerning it. This process at stake being transformed by collective and individual experiences, in which we are both the object and the subject, also indicates that an entity uncertainly falling in-between being alive or not, that is the virus, has been added as the primary actor to the usual sociological actors such as states, corporations, markets, social institutions, and individuals. Therefore, it is important to try to grasp this in its peculiarity and develop unhurried yet impactful envisagement, particularly through critical approaches within the field of social sciences.
Within the scope of this substantiality explained, Üsküdar University is holding the 2nd International Symposium of Loneliness on 4-5 December 2020, bearing the major theme “Loneliness and Pandemic”. With this scientific organization where national and international scholars with important studies concerning loneliness, we invite you
- to question the ideas of the modern civilizationsociety-individual, as always been done in all historical-critical moments,
- to review anthropocentrism and posthumanism,
- to step beyond the dualities built upon liveliness, consciousness, and subjectivity,
- to discuss the relationship between coexistence and the atomized individual with concepts like isolation, social distance, and the new normalization process,
- to reconsider the economic, political, cultural, and social dimensions of loneliness,
- to tackle the new aspects of loneliness such as “unexpected loneliness” or “compulsory loneliness” that would possibly be added to the types of loneliness and the relevant classifications, which we emphasized in the previous symposium last year
Prof. Dr. Ebulfez Süleymanlı
Chair of the Organization Committee
Üsküdar University
Head of Sociology Department, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences