Emotional Alienation In Modernity: Apathy, Individualism, and Social Disconnection

This session examines emotional alienation as a key social consequence of modernity, individualization, and social atomization. While modernity expanded personal autonomy and weakened traditional forms of authority, it also produced new forms of disconnection: isolation, indifference, and the erosion of solidaristic ties. Rather than treating apathy as a purely psychological deficit, the session approaches it as a socially produced condition embedded in institutions, competitive social relations, and moral economies.Recent debates have revived alienation as a diagnostic concept for understanding contemporary social contradictions, including weakened reciprocity, recognition, and attachment to others. Within this framework, emotional alienation is not simply a lack of feeling, but a patterned social relation shaped by neoliberal pressures, fragmented forms of belonging, and the normalization of “othering”. The session is especially interested in how indifference becomes socially functional: how institutions, media environments, and everyday interaction can reproduce emotional distance while obscuring its structural causes. We invite papers that examine the social, political, and cultural dynamics through which apathy emerges and circulates in contemporary societies. Contributions may address empirical or ethnographic cases of emotional alienation, the role of exclusion and dehumanization in sustaining indifference, or the consequences of atomization for social trust and collective life. We also welcome analyses of practices that counter emotional disconnection, including solidarity, care, narrative repair, and political reattachment. This session seeks to clarify how modern forms of individualism reshape not only social structures but also the emotional capacities through which people relate to one another and to the social world.