| Summary: |
In lieu of our Annual Weissbourd Conference, the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago will host a “Weissbourd Dialogues” series over the first half of 2021. This year’s series, hosted via virtual symposia, will bring together speakers from different scholarly and professional fields to discuss and present work on the theme of Solitude. Although a topic of long-standing interest in the humanities and social sciences, solitude and its conceptual kin (isolation, loneliness, anomie, alienation, seclusion, etc.) have become everyday modes of life during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, as we socially distance from each other’s bodies and breath, the tendrils of our social lives continue to stretch out, shoot back, and, in effect, compel us to ask: what good is solitude, after all? As an experiment in what Roland Barthes calls “being alone together” (idiorhythmy), this year’s Weissbourd Dialogues emphasizes solitude as a fundamental feature of social life rather than its abrogation. Each virtual symposium will bring together scholars and practitioners from psychoanalysis, critical race theory, architecture, neuroscience, art history, anthropology, poetry, philosophy, urban studies in order to query the values, practices, and challenges of being alone.
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