Animate, attune, amplify

This chapter defines loneliness and explains the approach of the research. The project was committed to investigating loneliness beyond individualising and psychological accounts. Instead there was a commitment to engage with the social conditions of loneliness, such as poverty, inequality and precarity which shape youth experience. Youth work practices and partnership working were crucial to developing safe and productive research relationships with the youth co-researchers throughout the project. Loneliness is something that cuts through and across young people’s lives and so the study of it requires a transdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together insights from diverse fields to understand youth loneliness where lonely young people are not just lonely nor are they merely young. The chapter concludes with an outline of book’s structure.