The Loneliness Room - (Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography) by Sean Redmond (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

This remarkably unique book takes the conceit of the loneliness room to show how everyday artistic practice opens up loneliness to new definitions and new understandings. Refusing to pathologise loneliness, the book draws on the creative submissions supplied by its participants to demonstrate that being lonely can mean different things to different people in differing contexts. Filled with the photographs, paintings, videos, songs, and writings of its participants, The loneliness room is a deeply moving account of loneliness today.

https: //sredmond4.wixsite.com/lonelyroom

From the Back Cover

This wonderful book made me rethink loneliness.
Kath Woodward, Emeritus Professor, Open University

To understand the intellectual reach of a creative ethnography read this book, but to explore the complexity of our lonely hearts and their generative potential, you need to sit with it awhile, take on the book's rhythm, and then set aside space for hope.
Helen Wood, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, Aston University

Sean Redmond has here crafted a moving and innovative ethnography that gives shape and form to an ideology of loneliness that illustrates its broader connections to therapy culture, neoliberal capitalism, and the liquid speed of modernity.
Brenda R. Weber, Provost Professor and Jean C. Robinson Scholar, Indiana University, Bloomington

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, documentary, music and sound, and poetry and literature. The book powerfully shows how these representations create discourses in and around loneliness that lay its cause at the doors of individuals rather than the political and economic structures of neo-liberal capitalism. The book 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.

Review Quotes

'Drawing on a rich and diverse range of artistic, creative, everyday, and contemporary interactions, the book wrestles with over-easy definitions, just as it challenges the uneven conditions of late capitalism. To understand the intellectual reach of a creative ethnography read this book, but to explore the complexity of our lonely hearts and their generative potential, you need to sit with it awhile, take on the book's rhythm, and then set aside space for hope.'
Helen Wood, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Lancaster

'There is an elegant, elegiac, quality in the Loneliness Room, where Sean Redmond dwells upon the essence, reasons for and experience(s) of loneliness drawing on an exceptional methodological mosaic of creative participatory ethnography and autoethnography. The Loneliness Room, intended as a creative canvass where people talk about and (re)present their loneliness, is an academic piece of work about loneliness with unprecedented originality and artistry, poetically delivered and premised upon the audio-visual, sensory and artistic narratives of its participants, while also drawing from different kinds of media production (cinematic, documentary, photographic, music, sonic, social media) and is set within a 'pandemic imagination'.
Professor Liza Tsaliki, Department of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

'The Loneliness Room is a stunning book of creativity and compassion that speaks in ways large and small to a shared experience - we all get lonely from time to time along life's journey. Using a diverse archive that includes autobiographical writing, feature films, poetry, sound, gender and cultural theory, and the responses of ordinary people like you and me, Sean Redmond has here crafted a moving and innovative ethnography that gives shape and form to an ideology of loneliness that illustrates its broader connections to therapy culture, neoliberal capitalism, and the liquid speed of modernity.'
Brenda R. Weber, Provost Professor and Jean C. Robinson Scholar, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

'This wonderful book made me rethink loneliness. The loneliness room, which each of us can make our own embraces the isolation of loneliness and its creativity and regenerative potential.'
Professor Kath Woodward, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, School of Social Sciences & Global Studies, Sociology, Open University, UK

'During the [Covid-19] lockdowns, individuals were encouraged to practice self-care and change their routines to overcome loneliness. This context supports Redmond's central argument: our current understandings of loneliness fail to engage with the systemic and social causes of chronic loneliness. This was evident long before the pandemic, and neoliberal capitalism puts the onus on the individual to treat their loneliness - for example, through lifestyle choices - without recognising the economic and political systems that create loneliness and weaken community. Importantly, Redmond does not deny that chronic loneliness is a problem affecting many individuals but instead seeks to redefine how we talk about it.'
Leah Kennedy, The Sociological Review

About the Author