‘Let’s be Lonely Together’: Co-Constructing Narratives of Loneliness with University Students in the United Kingdom

During the past fifty years, loneliness has been dominantly conceptualised through psy-disciplines, and an in-depth qualitative understanding of loneliness remains needed, especially among young people.
This research explores students’ experience of loneliness in UK universities. It examines the social and cultural context where relationships between students are constructed. It aims at understanding loneliness experiences in depth. It examines how the intersectionality of gender, race, class, nationality, and culture translates into different experiences of loneliness, which universities might not fully understand yet.
The study followed a narrative inquiry approach, where ten students of multi-ethnic backgrounds from different universities in England shared their stories of loneliness. they shared their stories in various forms and ways e.g., oral storytelling through narrative interviews in person/online, written storytelling via Google document in the form of diary entries, and collection of photos capturing moments of loneliness. These stories were then analysed through two layers of narrative thematic analysis.
The research findings show that loneliness is constructed as a burden that students do not want to share with others. Students feel pressured to perform belonging even when they feel lonely, and they live with a stigma that arises from erroneous dominant neoliberal discourses framing success as independence and self-reliance. The importance of groupings is another significant finding; groups are built on hetero/white normative standards of ‘student experience’, which is mainly exclusionary to many students. Finally, universities can foster a specific type of loneliness, ‘ethical loneliness’ (Stauffer,2015), in which students feel neglected by systems that cannot keep up with their students’ mental well-being. Relationships with tutors are crucial in this context as they determine if the student feels seen or ignored. The study argues that a slow, relational understanding of loneliness is needed.
The findings provide a foundation for developing improvements in professional practice in universities. In particular, this study will help UK universities to understand better the particularities of students’ loneliness and their social and academic experiences and how best to design appropriate support.