An Empathy-Building Toolkit for Museums

The increasingly complex problems of our world point out to a fundamental truth: the wellbeing of humanity and our world depends on human beings' understanding that we each are integral to a fragile, indivisible whole: all of humanity and the planet itself. Empathy, our ability to imagine what it might feel like to be the other, is essential to cultivate a sense of belonging and love towards the fragile oneness of existence.
Museums as informal learning platforms that reflect the subjects, themes, and contexts representing all aspects of life, have a unique advantage and a responsibility to intentionally contribute to empathy-building in our world by offering opportunities for experiential learning of empathy as a portal to a deep understanding of our interconnected and interdependent existence. Within this context, empathy is defined as a form of perception, enabling us to connect with ourselves and others through a cultivation of self-knowledge, while awakening us into the interconnectedness and the oneness of being. When we recognize the intrinsic value of each element that makes up the whole, we calibrate and harmonize our attitudes, behaviors and actions towards the other. This is key to take sustainable actions towards major global challenges our world is facing, such as fragmentation, othering, as well as social and environmental injustices.
An Empathy-Building Toolkit for Museums will offer a rich variety of practical and multidisciplinary solutions to empathy-building with potential for adaptation, implementation, and scaling through a variety of museums, and other informal learning platforms, that aspire to become incubators of empathy in their respective sectors, institutions, systems, and communities.

Elif M. Gokcigdem, Ph.D., is the founder of Empathy-Building Through Museums Initiative. She is an innovative thought leader, a historian of Islamic art, and a museums scholar who is committed to creating fertile grounds of empathy through informal learning platforms to inspire positive behavior change, caring mindsets, and compassionate worldviews that value all of humanity and the planet. Gokcigdem is the author of two visionary books on empathy-building: Fostering Empathy Through Museums (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and Designing for Empathy: Perspectives on the Museum Experience (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). She is the chief curator and co-chair of the world's first museums and empathy summit titled: "Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion Through Museums with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama," which took place in October-November, 2018 in Dharamsala, India.