Conversations on Empathy

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy - be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" - others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice.

Francesca Mezzenzana is a Principal Investigator/ Senior Researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Germany. Daniela Peluso is an Emeritus Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, UK.

Foreword: Empathy Redux Murray Smith Introduction Francesca Mezzenzana and Daniela Peluso Part I: Framing empathy and otherness: interdisciplinary perspectives 1 On Empathy and its Limits: A Manifesto Jason Throop 2 Being Open and Looking On: Fluctuations in everyday life and Psychology Vasudevi Reddy 3 A Psychological exploration of empathy Heather Ferguson and Lena Wimmer 4 Autism and the 'double empathy problem' Damian Milton, Krysia Emily Waldock, and Nathan Keates Part II: Imagining others: human interactions 5 Dynamics and Vicissitudes of Empathy Douglas Hollan 6 Should we be against empathy? Engagement with antiheroes in fiction and the theoretical implications for empathy's role in morality Margrethe Bruun Vaage 7 Cultivating an Empathic Impulse in Wartime Ukraine Catherine Wanner and Valentyna Pavlenko 8 Capital Empathy, and the Inequality of the Radical Other Robin Truth Goodman 9 Situating Empathy: Holocaust Education for the Middle East/Muslim Minority in Germany Esra Özyürek Part III: Imagining others: encounters beyond-the-human 10 Just like humans: similarity, difference and empathy towards nonhumans in the Amazonian rainforest. Francesca Mezzenzana 11 Un-Tabooing Empathy: The Benefits of Empathic Science with Nonhuman Research Participants Christine E. Webb, Becca Franks, Monica Gagliano and Barbara Smuts 12 Augenblick and the 'rush' of extraordinary encounters: empathy and sociality with non-human radical others in Amazonia Daniela Peluso 13 Robots as radical others: Implications of children's social, emotional, and relational interactions with robots for human-robot empathy Jacqueline M. Kory Westlund Afterword: Empathy's Entanglements Carolyn Pedwell