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

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 (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.