Forthcoming Book: Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of
Empathy.
How to build a culture of empathy? Realizing that 'empathy' is not one thing and that it may not always
be positive. A critical approach to thinking through the politics of
empathy needs to consider the ways in which empathy may produced,
mobilized and be felt differently across different times, spaces and
contexts. It also needs to take into account the risks and
contradictions of practices of empathetic engagement, as well as their
more productive possibilities. Rather than thinking about
empathy as a discrete or singular emotion, I'd recommend that we think
more critically about the ways in which it is linked with other
emotions, such as power, shame, etc
(Video
Transcriptions: If you would like to take empathic action
and create a transcription of this video, check
the volunteers page. The transcriptions will make it easier for
other viewers to quickly see the content of this video.)
"Creating more or better empathy is now framed as an
affective ‘solution’ to a wide range of social ills and as a central
component of building cross-cultural and transnational social justice.
Yet empathy - understood in shorthand as the affective ability to ‘put
oneself in the other’s shoes’ - can easily become a kind of end-point.
Precisely because it is so widely and unquestioningly viewed as ‘good,’
its naming can represent a conceptual stoppage in conversation or
analysis. Thus, the most pressing questions tend less to be ‘what is
empathy?’, ‘what does it do?’, ‘what are its risks?’, and ‘what happens
after empathy’, but rather the more automatic refrain of ‘how can we
cultivate it?’ It is also evident that, although a number of
commentators in the global North insist that empathy can play an
important role in mediating relations between different social and
cultural groups and across national and geo-political boundaries,
relatively scant attention has been paid specifically to the
transnational politics of empathy. "
"Empathy, it would seem, has become a Euro-American
political obsession. Within contemporary liberal political imaginaries –
from Obama’s political rhetoric, to international development discourse,
to particular strands of feminist and anti-racist theory and praxis –
empathy has been conceptualised as an affective capacity or technique
via which ‘we’ can come to know the cultural ‘other’. Through
transporting one into the affective world of another, it is argued,
empathic perspective-taking can promote cross-cultural dialogue and
understanding that leads to political action in the interests of
transnational social justice."
- The Academic Feminist Goes Global: A Conversation with Carolyn Pedwell
In this month’s column, our travels in academic feminism take us to the UK
for a conversation with Carolyn Pedwell, a Lecturer in Media and
Cultural Studies at Newcastle University. The conversation explores how
a transnational approach to feminist theory can uncover erasures of
women’s experiences, and asks what happens when the current culture of
commodification puts a price on everything – including empathy.
Your most recent work is on empathy and international development. Can
you briefly outline the main premise of this work? This work is part of
a book I’m writing, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of
Empathy (Palgrave, forthcoming), that examines the potentialities and
risks of figuring empathy as a tool for transnational social justice.
The idea for the book started from an observation that ‘empathy’ today
seems to be everywhere – and is everywhere presumed to be ‘good’. While
President Obama has called on Americans to address the nation’s ‘empathy
deficit’ for those who are struggling, both inside and outside the
nation, feminist and anti-racist theorists have long argued that
engagement based on empathy is integral to fostering social justice and
solidarity transnationally.
Yet precisely because empathys so widely and unquestioningly viewed as
positive, critical analysis of its limits and problems in the context of
transnational power relations tends to be avoided or deferred. As a
result, the most pressing questions tend less to be ‘what is empathy?’,
‘what does it do?’ or ‘what are its risks?’, but rather the more
automatic refrain of ‘how can we cultivate it?’ Through close readings
of a range of ‘affective texts’, from Obama’s political memoirs and
speeches, to postcolonial literary works, to best-selling business
books, I argue that, although empathy can generate transformative social
connections, it can also (re)produce dominant gendered, racialised,
sexualised and classed hierarchies and exclusions on a global scale.
In international development professional and training literatures, for
example, the language of empathy signals a concern with ‘participatory’
practices of development, yet at the intersection of neoliberalism and
postcoloniality, empathy may function less to produce a transformative
way of relating to others then it does to enhance the moral and
affective skills of development professionals – skills that have market
value in a neoliberal economy in which even emotions, it seems, can now
be bought and sold. Against visions of empathy shaped by neoliberal
political will, my project considers the possibilities of a more
open-facing ‘empathy of becoming’ that emerges from the affective
dynamics of transnational encounters.
Forthcoming
Book: Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of
Empathy
Empathy
is today framed as affective panacea to a wide range of social ills
internationally. While President Obama has called on Americans to
address the nation’s ‘empathy deficit’ and feel for those who are
struggling, both inside and outside the nation (2006: 67-8), feminist
and anti-racist theorists have long argued that ‘engagement based on
empathy’ is integral to fostering ‘social justice’ and ‘solidarity’
transnationally (Alexander and Mohanty,1997: xlii). Affective
Relations explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary
affective injunction to ‘be empathetic’ and their complex transnational
implications. Through close reading of a range of popular and scholarly
‘affective texts’ - including Obama’s political memoirs and speeches,
postcolonial literary and cultural works, best-selling business books,
international development literatures, popular science writing and
feminist, anti-racist and queer theory - it employs a critical feminist
perspective to investigate the possibilities, risks and contradictions
of figuring empathy as a tool for engendering transnational social
justice. Although empathy may enable transformative political
connections, the book argues, it can also reconstitute gendered,
racialised, sexualised and classed hierarchies on a global scale. As
such, a critical approach to thinking through the transnational politics
of empathy needs to account for its ineven effects - the particular
social and geo-political exclusions and inequalities it can uphold.
Opening up ways of thinking
empathetic politics that take us beyond universalist calls to ‘put
oneself in the other’s shoes’, the book examines empathy’s dynamic
relationship to processes of location, translation and imagination. This
involves exploring the ways that emotions are radically shaped by
relations of history, power and violence in the context of
postcoloniality, globalisation and neoliberalism, and fleshing out the
potentialities and limitations of ‘affective translation’ across
cultural, geo-political and temporal contexts. Moving away from liberal
and neoliberal narratives which invest empathetic perspective-taking
with a near magical power to bridge all differences and heal all wounds,
the book explores how imaginative empathies might offer new and
transformative ways of thinking (and feeling) the links between emotion,
affect and social change in a transnational frame.
It aims to contribute to
an affective theory and politics which do not view emotions
instrumentally as sources of, or solutions to, complex social, political
and economic problems, but rather examine diverse and shifting relations
of feeling for what they might tell us about the affective workings of
power, and the emergent possibilities for radical political
solidarities, transnationally.
------------------------------------------------------------------
ideas for building a culture of empathy
1. Realizing that 'empathy' is not one thing and that it may not always
be positive. A critical approach to thinking through the politics of
empathy needs to consider the ways in which empathy may produced,
mobilized and felt differently across different times, spaces and
contexts. It also needs to take into account the risks and
contradictions of practices of empathetic engagement, as well as their
more productive possibilities.
2. Rather than thinking about empathy as a discrete or singular emotion,
I'd recommend that we think more critically about the ways in which it
is linked with other emotions, such as
(Power)
(criticism)
anger
shame
fear
hope
Instead of posting 'empathy' as necessarily 'positive'
or 'good' against other emotions (such as anger or shame) as 'negative'
or 'bad', we should avoid such good/bad emotion binaries by
acknowledging that emotions are ambivalent (rather than pure), and that,
in particular circumstances, it might be the mutual presence and
interaction of multiple emotions (e.g. empathy, anger and shame) that
causes produce self and or social transformation to occur. As such, I
ultimately argue for thinking about the implications of 'affective
relations' rather than focusing only empathy per se.
3. Thinking more imaginatively about empathy (and linked emotions).
Empathy is usually defined in the mainstream as the act of 'putting
oneself in the other's shoes'. But what if empathy is not just about
imagining oneself as or in the position of another person, but something
that moves beyond the human subject (i.e. affectively sensing and
imagining social and political possibilities beyond that status quo,
beyond what we already think we know is 'true' or 'inevitable'). So, I'm
arguing for a radical re-linking of empathy and imagination that might
help us to think - and feel - social world in which existing lines of
privilege are radically re-assembled rather than simply reproduced.
