Empathy (discourse)

This book aims to shed light on how different national and cultural communities across the world have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic since its inception at the start of 2020. The public debates about the pandemic have articulated a vast range of critical reflections on communication: agenda-setting, categorisation and metaphorisation of the illness and the administrative responses to it, perceived ‘performances’ of specific governments and administrations in dealing with it, as well as empathy (and lack of it) in the communication of doctors, carers, patients, patients’ relatives, public services and further social institutions involved in dealing with the crisis.
The present volume provides exemplary case-studies of key aspects in the of public debates during the first year of the pandemic:
● How was the pandemic, its official existence and nature, defined and categorized at national and international level?
● How has the public been guided to understand the pandemic and how does this guidance work?
● Why and how has the management of the pandemic been imagined as a war – and what implications does the use of this conceptual metaphor have for the course of the debate?
● How are the intra- and inter-national conflicts and rivalries that arise from the pandemic articulated?
● How do nation-states, health institutions and non-governmental organisations foster solidarity and conflict resolution in the context of the pandemic?

The ability to express and feel empathy has long been presented as one of the defining traits of what it means to be human. Although this ability is increasingly being recognised in non-­‐human entities, this very act of identification roots the empathetic response further in a " natural " bodily automatism that is involved in mediating social experience and the way we relate to others. This workshop will complicate the immediacy of the feeling of empathy – our ability to really feel " it " , be moved and reach out to the other – by foregrounding that the expression of empathy also hinges on " specific " cultural knowledge and experience, which shapes our perception of and responses to others. If we accept that empathy is not merely a " universal " human phenomenon, but one that is also situated, at work in different ways in different places and situations, then empathy also reveals a fractious potential. Rather than making us merely reach out to others, empathy also immunises an " us " against those for whom no such feelings are felt. Whilst feeling empathy we inevitably also have the impression of " understanding " the other, which embeds the other's pain in our own experience and system of values, even though these values may not be universally shared. Here the genuine expression of empathy can end up entrenching stereotypes, power-­‐relations and cultural ignorance because the other's situation seems so immediately understood and obvious. Empathy can also lead to moral catharsis, which vents emotional tensions and doubts to give one the impression of " caring " and " sharing " the other's pain. As such, it can act as a disincentive to scrutinise one's own behaviour and might lead to inaction and the sanitation of the violence of social exclusion and structural injustices. The very fact that a wide range of cultural practices – from adverts, political speeches, TV-­‐soap operas, museum exhibitions to music and sentimental literature – routinely seek to elicit empathetic responses, alerts us to the political and mediated nature of this feeling. When we all cry at the same time in a Hollywood movie, is this really an expression of our shared humanity, or are other forces at work here also? The participants of this workshop will have the opportunity to engage in a day long discussion about the construction and role of empathy in the sphere of cultural politics. Key points of discussion will include cultural translation, empathy and international geo-­‐politics, postcolonialism, critical race studies, feminist and gender studies, national identity, class and memory studies and the connected questions of the politics of representation and technological mediation, especially in the context of digital media, literature and the arts. The overarching aim of the day is to raise awareness of the multiple ways in which empathy intersects with cultural politics, and to help participants gage how questions of cultural politics intersect with their own work. As such, this workshop will be useful for researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds. The programme (overleaf) is designed to combine a thematic overview of the field with workshops and presentations by participants. Deadline for Application / Registration: 30 th of April, 2017 To set the ground for the discussions, participants are asked to register for the event by preparing a short (300-­‐400 word) narrative about their own research and how this touches on empathy. These narratives will be circulated in advance to all participants and will form the basis for introductions and workshops on the day. Some foundational reading has also been recommended. Please send your application to: MullerCJ@cardiff.ac.uk and andreamaria.zimmermann@unibas.ch

Abstract: This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to
assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate
empathy with the morally and socially “good”—with compassion, understanding,
cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality—ignores what we propose to call the
“dark side of empathy”: that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely
deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by means of vicariousness.
Two diverse ethnographic cases, of hunting in Siberia and political
violence in Indonesia, provide the empirical background for a discussion of the
complex relationship of empathy to mimesis, deception, violence, and sociality.

The term empathy has become a linguistic commonplace in everyday communication as well as in interdisciplinary research. The results of the research questions, raised in the last hundred (and more) years, coming from different areas, such as aesthetics, psychology, neurosciences, literary theory, lack in fact a clear concept of empathy. Not surprisingly a recent paper has identified up to 43 distinct definitions of empathy in academic publications. By reconstructing the main research lines on empathy, our paper highlights the reasons for this conceptual inadequacy and the deficiencies in the theorization of empathy that create misleading interpretations thereof. Along the line connecting Plato’s insights on empathic experiences to the present neuroscientific experiments, a broad spectrum of issues is deployed for which “empathy” functions as an umbrella term covering a net of categorial relationships – projection, transfer, association, expression, animation, anthropomorphization, vivification, fusion, sympathy – that only partially overlap. Our paper therefore recommends that “empathy” should not be assumed as a self-evident notion, but instead preliminarily clarified in its definition every time we decide to have recourse to it.

Engineering and design students are often required to evaluate their products against user requirements, but frequently, these requirements are abstracted from the user or context of use rather than coming from actual user and context data. Abstraction of user requirements makes it difficult for students to empathize with the eventual user of the product or system they are designing.  In previous research, Design Heuristics have been shown to encourage exploration of design solutions spaces at the initial stages of design processes. This study combines use of Design Heuristics in an engineering classroom context with a method designed to connect students with an understanding the context of the user, product use setting, and sociocultural milieu. We adapted an existing method, the cognitive walkthrough, for use in an engineering education context, renaming it the empathic walkthrough. In this study, this method was revised and extended to maximize empathy with the end user and context, using these insights to promote a more situated form of idea development using the Design Heuristics cards. We present several case studies of students using this method to expand their notion of situated use, demonstrating how this method may have utility for importation into engineering contexts. Our early testing has indicated that this method stimulates empathy on the part of the student for the design context within which they are working, resulting in a richer narrative that foregrounds problems that a user might encounter.

When most people think of empathy, they think of empathizing with someone else. Yet in personal as well as professional life you might find yourself caught between people or groups of people expecting you to ‘understand’ them. Circumstances where you are required to understand and maintain a connection with others can be a source of stress and can get in the way of the job-to-be-done. In this book we describe that to empathize successfully with others requires you to first empathize with yourself. Self-empathy is a tool with which to observe self, first creating presence and then becoming aware of one's own sensations, emotions, thoughts and needs. It requires a personal practice in which you suspend judgment in order for you to notice how experiences come and go. Self-empathy provides a foundation from which you can set out to practice empathy with others.

In this 2nd revised edition of the book, the authors have added references to recent research as well as chapters on ethical explorations in (self-)empathy and the light and dark side of empathy.