3rd International Symposium of Loneliness

III. INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF LONELINESS
“Digitalization and Loneliness”
10-11 December 2021

Dear Participants,
The 3rd International Symposium of Loneliness will take place online on 10-11 December 2021 with the theme of “Digitalization and Loneliness”.
The International Symposium of Loneliness, the first of which was held in 2019, is being held for the third time this year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected our lives as a global crisis since 2020, we will meet online this year as well as the last year. In connection with the current conditions and in the focus of the ongoing discussions, we would like to take the digitalization phenomenon as the main theme of the symposium. Within this thematic framework, it is very significant for us to question, discuss, and review the relationship between digitalization and loneliness from various perspectives. 
It is possible to say that we are living in the phenomenon of “digitalization” by recalling many debates that consider the 21st century as a reshaped and still evolving form of modernity and capitalism with the digitalization processes. Still, many questions continue to be relevant concerning the theme of digitalization and loneliness. How are the different stages, experiences, and subject positions of the digitalization process be shaped? How can the temporospatial dimension, structural reflections, and intersection points with other processes be tackled? How can the developments and predictions of digitalization, which are placed in various locations on the plane of utopias and dystopias, be handled with diversity and fluidity beyond binaries? Most importantly, how can the relationship between loneliness and digitalization be discussed in the context of the thematic intersection targeted by the symposium?
In the framework of these questions and alike, we aim to discuss the complex relations between digitalization processes and the condition of loneliness in an integrative, unique, and deep way. We invite our speakers and listeners from various academic and non-academic fields this year to examine and review the relationship between loneliness and digitalization within the framework of social transformations and imaginations.

Prof. Ebulfez Süleymanlı
Symposium Chair
Üsküdar University Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Head of the Sociology Department