Invited Lecture at Occidental College on Political Emotions and Digital Democracy

In April 2025, Senior Research Assistant Kristina Lekić Barunčić delivered an invited lecture at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Her talk, titled “Autoethnography in the Age of Political Anxiety,” explored the crucial role of political emotions, particularly anxiety, in shaping democratic engagement in contemporary societies.

Challenging the notion of politics as a purely rational domain, Lekić Barunčić highlighted how emotions serve not only as reactions to democratic instability but also as active forces in political judgment, institutional trust, and public discourse. Through a methodological lens of autoethnography, she presented personal narratives as tools for understanding broader socio-political dynamics, especially in a time marked by polarization, epistemic crises, and fragility in democratic structures.

Her lecture also emphasized the impact of digital technologies on democratic legitimacy. Drawing from her ongoing research project “Epistemic Democracy in Digital Era,” she addressed how digital environments both amplify political emotions and open new avenues for integrating marginalized perspectives into democratic deliberation.