Loneliness in Future Societies
With Payal Arora, Xiang Biao, Elira Turdubaeva and Daniel Schreiber
- Dialogue
How will we live together in the future – and what divides us? Amid digital connectivity, global inequality, and political surveillance, social relationships are undergoing fundamental changes. Technologies can reinforce isolation, replace care, and reduce intimacy to data. At the same time, they open up new possibilities for solidarity, self-empowerment, and new forms of connection.
The closing panel of the “Being Alone” program focus brings together perspectives from diverse social and political contexts that challenge and inspire one another as possible visions of the future.
Payal Arora, Professor of Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University, outlines a hopeful perspective in her keynote. Her research shows how people in the Global South use new technologies to counteract alienation and exploitation.
Xiang Biao, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research and companion of for the three-day programme, asks how technological infrastructures are changing our conceptions of loneliness – and how they shape our ability to form complex interpersonal relationships.
Daniel Schreiber, author and journalist, also turns his attention to new possibilities: He explores what forms of connectedness can emerge from the transformation of traditional partnership models—and how they respond to a loss of meaning and isolation.
Elira Turdubaeva, a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Research Center for Eastern Europe at the University of Bremen, describes how loneliness in repressive political systems becomes the object of calculation, control, and manipulation – and how this can weaken or render solidarity and resistance impossible.
The question of loneliness is thus also a question of power, participation, and the social cohesion of future societies. At the same time, it opens the door to the search for new forms of closeness, care, and community.
Dates
Current
Price: 10 €, reduced 7 €
Location
HAU1
Stresemannstr. 29, 10963 BerlinThere are two marked parking spots in front of the building. Access to the Parkett by means of a separate entrance with lift when necessary. Barrier-free restroom facilities are available.
