The feeling of social isolation — loneliness — has become an issue of public concern. Other disciplines have mostly ignored the social practices and social contexts of loneliness, and sociology has neglected the study of this subject since the 1970’s. As a result, we do not know how people use the social infrastructure around them when dealing feelings of social isolation in everyday life.

The current events surrounding COVID-19 and measures to mitigate it, for example, social distancing/quarantine, can result in the sudden salience of ‘social places’ and social infrastructure more widely because the breaches in everyday routines may reveal to individuals the importance of those routines. It is thus a critical time to gather personal accounts of COVID-19 related experience in order to understand, among other things, the subjective impacts of sudden mass social isolation and how it is experienced.

Qualitative accounts are gathered online across as diverse a sample as possible in order to record a wide variety of experiences of COVID-19 related events, to enable future comparative work on, in addition to perceived social isolation: inequalities of social isolation, political and economic impacts, ideological and cognitive dissonance effects, normlessness and normative (re-)construction, ontological insecurity, and social conflict.