The Loneliness Room

The loneliness room uniquely draws upon the art of ordinary people to explore and explain how and why they experience loneliness today. Refusing to hold to a single definition of loneliness, the book instead uses the metaphor of the loneliness room to enable people to submit artistic responses that are personal and political, and which often refute and resist the pathology that is attached to feeling lonely in the world.The loneliness room examines the art and media forms that so often are charged with representing loneliness, taking in photography, paintings, film, the documentary, music and sound, and poetry and literature. The book powerfully shows how these representations create discourses in and around loneliness which lays its cause and consequences and the doors of individuals rather than at the political and economic structures of neo-liberal capitalism.The loneliness room advances the tools and methods of audio-visual ethnography, showing how creative practice affords new opportunities for data gathering. As a book, it transforms not only the way we understand loneliness, but the practices we employ to better understand it.