WE ARE

It was created by Dr. Sergei Akopov ( CV ), a former Professor at the department of political sciences and IR at HSE University (Campus Saint-Petersburg). His fields of interest include Russia’s identity, ontological security, and “politics of loneliness.” In our challenging times of loneliness and despair Sergei decided to launch this new web portal which should serve as an on-line collaboration platform for “Laboratory on Politics of Loneliness and Solitude” among the so-called “Global Russians” and beyond. By “beyond” he means that gendered nationalism and militant sovereigntism is not only a problem for people with transnational identifications in Russia, but also for modern Global Americans, British (particularly after the 2020 Brexit), Germans, French, Indians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians etc. This on-line project covers four dimensions of modern politics of loneliness studies. It starts with explaining what is ‘politics of loneliness’ and what social science methods can be applied to study it. It then explores five opposites of loneliness and invites colleagues to resist our gendered nationalism and loneliness anxiety by enlarging transnational spaces of solitude in literature and arts.