The Loneliness Room: Creative Practice as Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Loneliness has become one of the most pressing research issues of the contemporary age, with a vast literature emerging from health, education, the social sciences, and cultural studies to better understand this “crisis” that has been created by the unequal and alienating forces of neo-liberal capitalism. Very rarely has creative practice been drawn upon to both access the way people feel, experience and understand loneliness, and to translate it into artistic modes/forms that better represent and embody the “pedagogy” of its everydayness. The loneliness room project, a four-year empirical study of loneliness, addressed this gap, inviting participants to submit creative responses and artworks that best captured what loneliness meant to them. In this article, I will explore the creative work through the specific lens of gendered loneliness: reading these submissions through the discourses of patriarchy and heterosexuality, and the “domestic” and “private” spaces that the work captured. Such work not only reveals through a participatory lens the way people envisage loneliness but demonstrate how the ground between ethnography and creative practice can be fruitfully brought together. The work submitted, “teaches us” about the role the creative imagination has in understanding gendered loneliness and the “rooms” that it is housed.