Dear Friends and Colleagues

I hope you are well and thriving. This is the first big mailing about the next conference in the Alone Together series of events. As before, it is a pandisciplinary conference of those researching any elements of solitude, silence and loneliness at any lifestage and in any professional or other context, organised by the ISRS: the International Society for Research on Solitude.

The next conference will be held in Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) in Lincoln, UK, from Thursday 25th to Saturday 27 April 2024. It is being organised jointly by BGU and by the University of Szczecin, Poland.

Important dates and information

The submission of abstracts will be welcome till the 25th of March 

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=1i2Jr2NFVUScBaOYpD8jYnVAGFGaLIRGpdlWCdegMnNUMTAwUjY1OVhDQVVQRkJHSjRNSEpPOVRPSC4u

Cost of participation in the conference (does not include accommodation)

·       General Attendees £135.00

·       BGU and University of Szczecin Staff and Students, Members of ISRS £108.00

Payment link. https://ecommerce.bishopg.ac.uk/product-catalogue/conferences/alone-together-conference 

We do not have accommodation for all those attending, although we hope to have a small number of rooms available on campus. Lincoln has a number of good hotels, and there are other possibilities that BGU can advise you on.

The theme of this conference is Mapping the Field: Challenges and Futures. This is part of an attempt to map the field, as the field of solitude studies crosses conventional disciplinary, professional and contextual boundaries, making it all too often a ‘hidden gem’ within other disciplines and fields. We would like it to be just a ‘gem’, and no longer ‘hidden’!

We are delighted to announce already the three keynote/plenary sessions.

- The opening session is by Michael Cholbi, Professor and Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Michael’s keynote will be: Attention, Solitude, and the Social Dimensions of Grief.

- The second is a panel session on the theme of Mapping the Field: Challenges and Futures with distinguished worldwide experts, and the panel – from different disciplines – and everyone attending the conference will be able to contribute.

- The third is by Julian Stern, Professor of Education and Religion at BGU, who will be doing a keynote on The Art, Literature and Music of Solitude. This will be accompanied by a book launch of his book of the same title.

We would like to mention various publishing possibilities related to the conference.

- There are editors of several journals who would welcome submissions on solitude. The Journal of Silence Studies in Education, based in Australia, Paedagogia Christiana, based in Poland, and The British Journal of Religious Education, based in the UK, would all welcome such submissions.

- The ISRS has a monograph series with Bloomsbury, on Solitude Studies. Editors of that series will be at this conference, and will be inviting and/or commissioning contributions to the series. Each volume in the series can be a conventional single-author monograph, or can be an edited collection.

- Directly related to this conference, we will be inviting and/or commissioning chapter authors for an edited contribution to the ISRS Solitude Studies series with Bloomsbury. This has the provisional title of Solitude at the Edge: Liminal Loneliness, and it is to be edited by Richard Cleveland of Georgia Southern University, USA, and Rafał Iwański of the University of Szczecin, Poland.

Do let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. It would be great to see you in Lincoln in April.

For all the detailed information and to book - see https://isrs.usz.edu.pl/at4/.

We will send out further emails, as we develop the conference further. If you do not want to be emailed again, just let us know!

Yours sincerely,

Rafał Iwański, Małgorzata Wałejko and Julian Stern, of the ISRS