How do citizens sustain a sense of normality amid upheaval and existential threat? What cultural mechanisms allow everyday life to detach from state violence? And how do institutions normalize not only work and service provision but also repression and war?

In this talk, Julia Lerner (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) explores these questions through a comparative analysis of Putin’s Russia and contemporary Israel, focusing on the wartime period from 2022 to 2025.

Despite their differences, both societies share striking parallels: ambivalent relations with the West, unique colonial projects, and a neo-conservative turn marked by rising nationalism, moral fundamentalism, and prolonged militarization. Each faces the paradox of “hyper-normalizing” everyday life in the midst of crisis.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, Lerner shows how both Russia and Israel have embraced and redefined the emotional language of therapeutic culture, where personal and public feelings are shaped through psychological discourse and neoliberal notions of self-regulation. Yet in the current ideological climate, citizens are increasingly expected to perform political loyalty through moralized emotions — shame, fear, pride, or contempt — fusing private affect with state ideology.

Her findings reveal how therapeutic culture intertwines with political violence: in Russia, emotional discourse both justifies repression and enables subtle resistance; in Israel, post-October 7 narratives of trauma privilege personal suffering over moral reflection.

Lerner proposes a phenomenological approach to understanding emotional citizenship in declining democracies — where the pursuit of individual comfort and emotional well-being coexists uneasily with collective mobilization for national supremacy.

Julia Lerner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and an invited researcher at Eur’Orbem (CNRS & Sorbonne University). She specialises in the anthropology of knowledge, migration and emotions, focusing on the social and political role of therapeutic language in public and private domains. She explores post-Soviet Russian and contemporary Israeli emotional cultures, as well as the Russian-speaking immigrant community in Israel, which is situated at the intersection of the two. Lerner has edited a special issue of Emotions and Society (1, 2021) on the 'Emotionalisation of Public Domains', in which she has published an article on the emotionalisation of university teaching in Russia, Israel and the US. In light of the radicalisation of political regimes in Russia and Israel, Julia is studying how emotional and psychological languages are reshaping public life, political discourse and civic subjectivities. She analyses, for example, the personal political expressions of Russian public figures in Russia (Russian Review, 2024, 83(1)), the therapeutic work on the national self in Israeli TV reality shows (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020, 24(5)), and social media campaigns condemning political migration from Putin’s Russia (American Behavioral Scientist, 2024). Bringing together several strands of her research, she is working on a manuscript entitled “The Emotionalization of Cultures in Political Turbulence”.

Language: English