Loneliness and the cultural, spatial, temporal and generational bases of belonging

Sociologists and psychologists now agree on the signi!cance of belonging to the experience of loneliness. Yet to date, this is unevenly re"ected in both survey instruments and qualitative inquiry where the focus is mostly on belongingness attributed to social connectivity, social support, intimate social bonds and interpersonal relationships. While these are very important, recent work on belonging itself has stressed the signi!cance of much wider bases of belonging, including place, temporality, memory, mobilities, generation, culture, labour processes, kinship systems, residential arrangements, settlement patterns, the public sphere and more-thanhuman factors. Drawing on evidence from sociology and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, this paper brings these insights together for the !rst time in order to develop a deeper consideration of belonging for loneliness research, and especially to identify further sources of variation in loneliness. In this article we will concentrate on kinship, cultural, spatial, temporal and generational bases of belonging, which while discrete are also often interrelated and linked to wider social structural developments associated with individualism and neoliberalism. We argue that this research is a necessary foundation for the “all-ofgovernment” strategies on loneliness that are just beginning to gain favour and traction through their consideration of individual and structural solutions.