The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna invites to its regular Transformative Salon on the 9th of October 2025 at 7 PM, this time with Anna Durnová (University of Vienna), moderated by Dorothee Bohle (University of Vienna).
Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Vienna.
Loneliness is more than a private feeling. Sometimes it is a welcome pause from everyday life, sometimes it is the painful experience of exclusion. This ambivalence makes it difficult to grasp loneliness clearly – is it a personal issue, a health risk, or a societal challenge? In recent years, some governments have begun to treat loneliness as something to be measured and regulated, often through health or security policies. Yet such approaches overlook how deeply loneliness is tied to social structures, cultural expectations, and the way we talk about it. What does it mean when emotions like loneliness become a matter of public concern? How far should institutions go in offering care ? By looking at everyday experiences of loneliness and the political debates around it, I explore the tension between personal privacy and collective responsibility.
The talk will be followed by a public discussion.
Anna Durnová is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Vienna and Faculty Fellow at the Yale University Centre for Cultural Sociology. Her research focuses on the role of emotions in democratic societies. Previously, she held the Elise Richter position at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna and worked at Charles University in Prague and the University of Lyon. She completed her habilitation at Sciences Po Paris. She has led numerous projects on democracy and emotions and currently coordinates the international Horizon Europe project CIDAPE. Her publications include The Politics of Intimacy (2018) and Understanding Emotions in Post-Factual Politics (2019). In addition to her academic work, she is also active as a writer, publishing a popular science children's book in 2022, and her feminist play Hodina ženy was staged by Divadlo Feste. In 2024, she was awarded the Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize for European Political Sociology.
Dorothee Bohle is a professor of comparative politics with a focus on Eastern and Southeastern Europe at the Institute of Political Sciences, University of Vienna. Previously she was a professor of political science at the European University Institute, Florence, and the Central European University, Budapest. Her research is at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy with a special focus on East Central Europe. She is the author of Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery (Cornell University Press 2012, together with Béla Greskovits), which won the Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Research, and of Europe’s New Periphery: Poland’s Transformation and Transnational Integration (in German, Münster 2002). Her current work looks at the turn towards anti-liberal politics and political economy in East-Central Europe after the Great Financial and in the context of the COVID-19 crisis.
FREE ENTRY! No registration required.
