Regulating loneliness? Redefining public intervention through emotional boundaries of home.

The pandemic has transformed the individual and the collective relationship, impacting how personal experience and individual requirements are presented to public institutions. This paper takes the example of ‘feeling alone’ induced by the stay-at-home directives to contain the COVID-19 pandemic to propose redefining the nature of public intervention through emotional boundaries of home. In general, the home as a private sanctuary lies in contrast to the public space, which might carry some of those dangers and inhibit or even forbid expressions of private engagements and related emotions to a socially acceptable level (Hochschild 2003, Berlant 2004). However, during the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, psychological helplines reported a steep rise in demand. Issues of loneliness, anxiety, and intensified need for self-care emerged as critical collateral damage of a long-lasting pandemic. While sociological research on emotions, privacy, and intimacy has shown that home is not merely a material shelter but also an emotionally loaded sphere (Jupp 2017), the interplay of public institutions with the emotional boundaries of a home remains understudied. Research on home and emotions is quite prominent in social geography but mainly in the context of people who have lost their homes (King & Christou 2011, Kale et al. 2019) or who have multiple homes due to their job or studies (Holton 2017). In all these works, home is conceived as the essential venue for the family’s social relations and intimate relationships. Regarding identifying appropriate policy responses, the home as a social space has also impacted research on aging and related understanding of modern urban spaces. This body of research shows us that home can be approached as a vernacular social space of individuals (see also Jupp 2017) in which individual experiences of emotions interact with collective understandings, norms of behavior, and public policy measures. Nevertheless, what if a home is a space of solitude and even loneliness? How does the public intervention change when the social interactions and resources that usually provide the connection with the public have abstained? In order to conceptualize these new conditions of public intervention, the paper combines sociological scholarship on privacy and emotions with recent research in public policy on emotions’ impact on government choices (Hoggett and Thompson 2012, Jupp et al. 2016, Patterson & Mastracci 2019) as well as on the processes through which those government choices impact the emotional spheres of people’s lives (Hunter 2015, Durnova & Hejzlarová 2018). Based on 22 narrations of people from single households during the first year of the pandemic in Czechia, the analysis focuses on experiences of disengagement, loneliness. It investigates whether and how these experiences are reflected and referenced in Czech policy documents and expert papers dealing with self-care and psychosocial well-being during 2020 and 2021.