1st Edition

Conversations on Empathy Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Imagination and Radical Othering

Edited By Francesca Mezzenzana, Daniela Peluso Copyright 2023
316 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

316 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

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

Biography

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.