“I want the world back”: Pandemic loneliness, bodies, and places

Abstract

Psychology has tended to conceptualize loneliness as a lack of intimate and social relationships. This analysis draws on the journal entries of 100 participants in the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP; a research study and online journaling platform that invited participants to chronicle their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic) to illustrate a more foundational sense of loneliness as a lack of bodily attunement, interaction, and intersection with others in a world of places. This bodies-in-places perspective reveals important material dimensions of loneliness that have often been overlooked. Loneliness is understood not as a static characteristic of the individual, but rather as an embodied and emplaced relational and ecological phenomenon.