Call for Papers:

Alone Together: The 5th International Pandisciplinary Conference on Solitude in Community
April 23-25, 2026
Georgia Southern University
Savannah, Georgia, USA
https://isrs.usz.edu.pl/10687-2/

Deadline for submission of abstracts: October 1, 2025

As organizers of the conference, the International Society for Research on Solitude (ISRS) welcomes contributions to the 5th International Pandisciplinary Conference on Solitude in Community: Alone Together which will take place between 23.04 and 25.04.2026 at Georgia Southern University, Armstrong Campus in Savannah, Georgia in the United States.

Hosted by Dr Richard E Cleveland at Georgia Southern University, the conference is also supported by Bishop Grosseteste University (UK) and the Institute of Pedagogy at the University of Szczecin (Poland), honoured with the auspices of both rectors.

The ISRS welcomes papers and posters on any issues related to solitude, silence and loneliness, from any discipline and from any professional/practice context, and from researchers from all over the world. The ISRS welcomes presentations focusing on empirical research, theoretical exploration, and/or practitioner-based applications.

The submission of abstracts will be welcome till the 1st October, 2025. (Later submissions will be considered if there is still room on the programme.)

To submit, please fill in the form here: click on the link

To register for the conference and to pay: click on the link

Conference registration requires a fee, approximately 200 USD/ 176 EUR / 148 GBP / 750 PLN for general registration covering participation, refreshments and conference materials. (No accommodation or travel included.) Individuals who are members of the ISRS may register for the reduced fee of $150 USD and students are invited to register at the student-rate of $90 USD.

Exhibitors interested in attending and presenting their materials must register through the same registration portal, paying the fee of $250 USD (Note. Conference planning team will connect with registered exhibitors prior to the conference).

A pre-conference training event is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday April 22, 2026. Individuals are invited to register for the event, but the pre-conference training will be specifically focused on US-based clinical mental health counseling practitioners. The event registration fee of $75 USD covers attendance and Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for maintaining national clinical licensure (i.e., NBCC). More information regarding the pre-conference schedule and trainers will be forthcoming.

The conference will be held in-person at the Georgia Southern University Armstrong campus. At this time, no online/hybrid availability is planned. If this changes, the ISRS will update and notify participants as soon as possible.

The ISRS conference organizers welcome your proposals and looks forward to meeting you!

All the best,

The AT5 Organizing Committee Members

Conference History and Publications

The idea of the Alone Together symposium emerged from the meeting of Prof Julian Stern (UK) and Dr Malgorzata Wałejko (Poland), both fascinated by the phenomenon of solitude. Dr Wałejko visited York St John University in 2018 thanks to the Erasmus+ programme, to meet and work with Prof Stern when he was based there.

Their common research resulted in publications with the participation of other solitude researchers (e.g. Solitude and Self-Realisation in Education in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2019; two special editions of Paedagogia Christiana: vol. 45 and 46; The Bloomsbury Handbook of Solitude, Silence and Loneliness), and also in the idea of meeting with other researchers from around the world interested in solitude, silence and loneliness.

The meetings led to establishing the International Society for Research on Solitude (ISRS). In the short time since then, the ISRS has grown and expanded its outreach connecting researchers and scholars; hosting interactive synchronous webinars; creating a solitude studies monograph series with Bloomsbury; and continuing to provide intentional dialogue for an international community through the Alone Together pandisciplinary conferences, at which more publications will be planned.

We would like to mention various publishing possibilities related to the conference. The ISRS has a monograph series with Bloomsbury, on Solitude Studies.  Editors of that series will be at this conference and will be inviting and/or commissioning contributions to the series.  Each volume in the series can be a conventional single-author monograph or can be an edited collection.

There are editors of several journals who would welcome submissions on solitude.  The Journal of Silence Studies in Education, based in Australia, Paedagogia Christiana, based in Poland, and The British Journal of Religious Education, based in the UK, would all welcome such submissions.

Conference Organizing/Sponsoring Institutions:

• International Society for Research on Solitude (ISRS)
• Georgia Southern University (USA)
• University of Szczecin (UK)
• Bishop Grosseteste University (Poland)

More information

More information is available on the conference website, https://isrs.usz.edu.pl/10687-2/