Public Space and the Geography of Loneliness is the first event in our series of The English Association’s special interest group on Loneliness and Technology.

Covid-19 has brought the severity of 21st-century experiences of loneliness newly into view. An integral part of the pandemic response has been to assume the sanctity and availability of private space and with it the family and the home as a refuge. But the privatisation of life and crisis overlooks the importance and the meaning of public space in responding to loneliness and creating possibilities of community. This event will address the architecture of loneliness, the relationship between loneliness and queer, feminist and refugee experiences and prompt reflection on how we might think about the importance of public space in the wake of Covid-19.

Speakers bios

Dr Regan Koch is Lecturer and Senior Tutor in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. He is also the Director of QMUL’s City Centre, an interdisciplinary urban research group. His work focuses on matters of urban public space, collective culture, sociality and the representation and imagination of cities. He is the co-editor of Key Thinkers on Cities (Sage 2017) and is currently writing a book entitled The Public Life of Cities to be published with University of Toronto Press.

Dr Matthew Ingleby is Lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury: Novel Grounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Bloomsbury: Beyond the Establishment (British Library, 2017). He serves on the editorial board of the London Journal and the advisory board of QMUL’s City Centre. His current project addresses the way space becomes increasingly conceived of as ‘contestable’ in the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth century until 1945. The project focuses on rent contestations between landlords and tenants, the role of railings in producing exclusion in the city, and the friction that arises as a result of the democratization of leisure in Margate.

Dr Clare Rishbeth is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield. She has led research projects on social inclusion in public open space located in London, Sheffield, Berlin and imminently in Beirut. The Bench Project, which she will be showing (in collaboration with The Young Foundation), emerged from her role in ‘Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature’ and with the applied remit of ‘#refugeeswelcome in parks’. Her academic curiosity and social values are focused on profiles of marginalisation – shaped by intersections of ethnicity, class and gender – and the importance of these in informing the civic ambitions of public space. Rishbeth has recently published both academic and professional facing outputs on refugee inclusion and wellbeing; young people, mental health and nature connections; evaluating intercultural public spaces in Bradford; and ethnographic understandings of ethnically diverse neighbourhoods to inform urban design practice.

Loneliness and Technology

Loneliness and Technology is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that has been set up to think about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them.

Loneliness and Technology is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that has been set up to think about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them. It’s designed to initiate discussion around how we think about loneliness as a political history of emotion, how literature offers us a space to nurture solitude, and how technology induces and resists feelings of isolation.

The aim of the project is to investigate how a range of fields, as they struggle to adapt to the digital, depend on literary elements to convert feelings of isolation into more productive forms of solitude and loneliness. The intention is to provide a forum to think about the challenges to teaching and working online in the current climate, and literature’s role in providing us with the emotional skills to manage that adaptation.

It is designed as a cross-sector and interdisciplinary project that seeks to draw on expertise in the fields of literature, psychoanalysis, digital humanities, mental health, architecture and the history of work and education to bring together researchers and prompt discussion around how we relate to the digital and what it’s possible to do with thinking and feeling.

https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/sigs/loneliness-and-technology