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The essay stresses the potential value of empathy in designing strategies for resilience. We question the traditional idea of empathy as an individual skill addressed to understand the other, in support of a conceptualization closer to the phenomenological interpretation, focused on the relational dynamics at stake in human encounters. The paper reconsiders empathy as an experience valuable for strengthening a resilient attitude within collaborative projects. A case study will be featured, i.e. Design in The Middle, an ongoing project that gathers designers, architects and social activists from the Middle East/Euro-Med regions with the aim of generating design proposals to address challenges relevant to the Middle East. As participants come from very different cultural, political and religious backgrounds, their cooperation is a central and critical issue, which might benefit from contextual and relational "rules" enabling empathic experiences. In the context of the first Design in The Middle workshop (2017), some strategies have proven to be crucial in enabling effective communication over complex design issues. These strategies will be analysed according to a methodology developed in a previous research carried out by the author(s) (Devecchi, 2018) about the role of empathy in collaborative processes. Assuming that a resilient society preserves and supports cultural diversity, Design in the Middle stands as an example of collaborative design practice aimed at creating a more resilient future for these regions in which the coexistence of diverse cultural, religious and political positions is a substantial matter of concern.

This brief essay uses several works of fiction and nonfiction to illustrate the profound character of evil that obtains when individuals lose their capacity to empathize with the circumstances and situation of others. W.H. Auden explored the contours of human evil throughout much of his career and argued that it inhered, even at its most vicious, in all of humankind. The persistent challenge for nations particularly and civilization more generally is to acknowledge that fact and to ensure that this omnipresent and often apparently "unspectacular" force is not unleashed. The paper provides several examples aimed at illustrating that observers should consider current trends in American policy and politics carefully as they signal a sharp decline in empathy for major groups within the polity, an inauspicious sign for United States democratic politics.

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal New Formations and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:89/90.09.2016. ; This article questions the assumption that empathy is a positive, politically beneficial emotion through two examples of poetry about deaths with sensitive political dimensions. I begin by returning to the origins of 'empathy' in English, as written about by Vernon Lee in the earlytwentieth-century, to show how far the word has drifted from Lee's sense of it as an embodied aesthetic response to an artwork. Rob Halpern's book of poems Common Room refuses imaginative empathy with its subject, a dead Guantanamo Bay detainee, and yet, I show, surprisingly aligns with Lee's sense of empathy through the author's erotic and imaginative response to the man's autopsy report. What results in this revivification of Lee's empathy is a violation of the religious beliefs of the detainee. In contrast, Andrea Brady's poem 'Song for Florida 2' takes up a more contemporary sense of empathy in its focus upon the killing of the unarmed teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Brady's poem presents several possibilities for empathising with Martin's mother - by imagining being her, or imagining similarly losing a son - but eventually draws back from this as a limit. Empathy here risks erasing the specificity of the racialized context which led to Martin's unjust death. The white poet's son cannot 'replace', even imaginatively, the black mother's son without effacing the difference which saw Martin targeted in the first place. Brady's poem, I argue, marks how empathy can violate through supplanting the grief and political context for that grief of the person to whom empathy is extended. What is needed instead of empathy is a commitment to political change.

This dissertation examines how a set of postmodern contemporary novels by women, queer, and writers of color in North and South America reframe the parameters of narrative empathy in order to revise what constitutes as an ethical human rights novel. This project is part of a growing scholarly discourse connecting the evolution of the novel in the Americas with changing conceptions of human rights as connected to racial, ethnic, and gender identity in the Americas. The writers discussed reconfigure the relationship between reader and victim within the human rights narrative genre. This reconfiguration is founded on a critical reconstruction of the problematic use of sentimental empathy in the nineteenth-century rights novel. Since this former brand of sympathy joined the burgeoning discourse of rights in the Americas to the representation of racialized or gendered corporeal suffering, the reader's understanding of personhood in the nineteenth century was ethically misguided and predicated on the victim's indignity. Chapter One details how Octavia Butler's Kindred critically rewrites nineteenth-century foundational nation-building texts. This chapter exposes the dangers of narrative voyeurism masking itself as empathy and instead points to an empathy devoid of identification through bodily suffering. Chapter Two looks at Sylvia Iparraguirre's Tierra del Fuego in order to deconstruct and revise both the colonial travel narrative and the South American nation-building genre. This chapter maps an alternative foundation for narrative empathy by fostering legal and temporal visibility for the indigenous subject and land. Chapter Three examines how Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña engages with nineteenth-century melodrama to define empathy as abject corporeality. This chapter defines empathy through psychological proximity and touch, demonstrating how the novel reforms political and gender identity at the cusp of Argentina's Dirty War. Chapter Four turns to an examination of Louise Erdrich's Tracks. Here empathy is defined through the reader's understanding of how nineteenth- century legal practices devastatingly defined land, voice, bodies, and citizenship in the United States. Chapter Five discusses Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez through its documentation of hemispheric genocide. This chapter shows how aesthetics can ethically capture empathy through silences and voids, documenting indigenous historical and bodily trauma. Human rights law and legal policy shapes and is shaped by the formal qualities of the novel and other art forms. The hemispheric human rights novel (1970-2009) uses narrative empathy to develop a closely interconnected relationship between law and literature. This, in turn, revises the relationship between the reader, the victim and national history by teaching readers how to ethically engage with the bodies and minds of the victims presented. First, the revision of the nineteenth-century melodrama and sentimentalism particular to the hemispheric context enables readers to witness the formal construction of an aesthetic model which uses absence and corporeal abjection in order to represent human rights abuses. And secondly, the use of legal documents and national history formally within the novelistic space allows readers to access literature vis-à-vis the national-legal space. Ultimately, as the reader beings participating in this process of decoding, their new responsibilities for the ethical reading practices demanded by the human rights novel are laid out, transforming the reader into an ethical witness.

Is empathy a remedy for prejudice? This short paper argues it has a large role to play. It explores the authors' observations as a Humanities teacher engaging Grade 8 Australian students between the ages of 12 and 14 in a study of the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. As students empathised with Aboriginal (Indigenous Australian) children forcibly removed from their families under Australian government policy in the twentieth century, they questioned the negative things they themselves had come to believe about Indigenous Australians.

This brief essay uses several works of fiction and nonfiction to illustrate the profound character of evil that obtains when individuals lose their capacity to empathize with the circumstances and situation of others. W.H. Auden explored the contours of human evil throughout much of his career and argued that it inhered, even at its most vicious, in all of humankind. The persistent challenge for nations particularly and civilization more generally is to acknowledge that fact and to ensure that this omnipresent and often apparently unspectacular force is not unleashed. The paper provides several examples aimed at illustrating that observers should consider current trends in American policy and politics carefully as they signal a sharp decline in empathy for major groups within the polity, an inauspicious sign for United States democratic politics. ; Published version

This workshop investigates the power of play between cultures, generations and disciplines, promoting empathy, compassion and positivity in human relations. Groups will work together to deconstruct games and other source materials to invent new ways of playing. Deconstructive approaches from literature, art, theatre and architecture are employed to give insight and generate ideas for cultural and generational interaction. The workshop connects to a project by ACTIVISMO PSD, the Parliament of Social Design, investigating Deconstructive, intergenerational play in Middlesbrough, UK. This session will involve the making of short narrative works (written, performed, produced, built, installed) or proposals for new games to be played. Participation will lead to increased ability to work collectively across cultures and generations. We will work in a studio space with tables, chairs, paper, computer, projector, internet connection and our own devices. We will set up a Video Booth to record descriptions of games to be shared with international partners of the project. What do we mean by Deconstructive Play? Looking at "games" we (or our parents and grandparents) used to play, taking them apart then inventing something else. We will deconstruct games from Asia and Europe by connecting with a group in Japan. We will consider theatre, performance and role play in several cultures. We will learn to translate, interpret and deliberately misinterpret. We will consider learning and unlearning as key attributes in education and look at how we can apply deconstructive principles to the workplace and social spaces. We will work in groups and connect with people from different backgrounds. We will find out if we can play in a foreign language, interpret and misinterpret instructions and rules.

We ask how state empathy, trait empathy, and role awareness influence dictator game giving in a monetarily incentivized experiment. We manipulated two factors: role awareness (role certainty vs. role uncertainty) and state empathy induction (no empathy induction vs. empathy induction). Under role uncertainty, participants did not know their role as a dictator or a recipient when making their choices. State empathy was induced by asking the dictators to consider what the recipient would feel when learning about the decision. Each participant was randomly assigned into one of the four conditions, and in each condition, participants were randomly assigned into dictator and receiver roles. The role assignment took place before or after decisions were made, depending on the condition. We also studied the direct influence of trait empathy on dictator game giving as well as its interaction with the experimental manipulations. Trait empathy was measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) before the experiment. Of our experimental manipulations, role awareness had an effect on dictator game giving; participants donated more under role uncertainty than under role certainty. Instead, we did not observe an effect of state empathy induction. Of trait empathy subscales, only affective empathy was positively associated with dictator game giving. Finally, role awareness did not influence all participants similarly but had a larger impact on those with low scores on trait empathic concern or trait affective empathy. Our results indicate that specific measures to induce altruistic sharing can be effective but their effect may vary depending on certain personal characteristics. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

Abstract: In this paper I will try to provide some arguments against a broad definition of "empathy". Firstly, I will deal with attempts to define empathy as an umbrella concept. Then, I will try to point out the four main elements which contribute to the confusion that researchers in both the social and political as well as the scientific and philosophical domains face when dealing with empathy. In order to resolve this confusion, I suggest applying David Marr's distinction to the field of empathy. Instead of providing an umbrella definition for empathy, which tries to account for all the data coming from different disciplines, I believe understanding that there are different levels of explanations and that different disciplines can contribute to each of them will provide a more detailed and less confused definition of empathy.Keywords: Empathy; D. Marr; de Waal; Identification; Helping-behavior; Cost-benefit Analysis. Contro una definizione ampia di "empatia"Riassunto: In questo articolo cercherò di fornire alcuni argomenti contrari all'adozione di una definizione ampia di "empatia". In primo luogo cercherò di definire la nozione di empatia come una sorta di ombrello concettuale. Proverò poi a indicare i quattro principali elementi responsabili delle confusioni di cui gli studiosi cadono vittima sia in ambito sociale e politico sia in ambito scientifico e filosofico quando si occupano di empatia. Per sgombrare il campo da questa confusione proporrò di applicare la distinzione avanzata da David Marr al campo dell'empatia. Anziché dare una definizione di empatia come una sorta di ombrello concettuale, cercando di tenere insieme tutte le evidenze provenienti da discipline diverse, sono convinta che la comprensione del fatto che possono darsi livelli differenti di spiegazione e che discipline diverse possano contribuire ognuna per proprio conto alla comprensione di questi livelli costituisca la via migliore per raggiungere una definizione di empatia più specifica e meno confusa.Parole chiave: Empatia; Marr; De Waal; Identificazione; Comportamento di aiuto; Analisi costi/benefici.

In Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement, Mirra describes the value of teaching "critical civic empathy" in K–12 literacy classrooms. Distinguished from standard curricular uses of empathy that stress politeness at the level of the individual, critical civic empathy challenges students to take active steps toward questioning how imbalances of power and privilege arise and what assumptions should be questioned in order to address those imbalances. Mirra examines various teachers who center social issues in their literacy classrooms through the use of literature, the techniques of high school debate, research methodologies that see students as knowledge producers, and the use of technology to create community and learning opportunities beyond the classroom. She ends on a reflective note, recognizing that teachers must also be willing to question their own pedagogical habits and the accepted norms of their school communities when teaching critical civic empathy. By outlining the ways in which empathy is useful in an educational context only when used to promote critical thinking skills, student empowerment, and increased engagement, Mirra provides excellent guidelines for constructing more effective socially engaged curricula.

In countries emerging from civil war, inclusive empathy is important for conflict resolution yet may be difficult to promote. Widening the predominant focus on personal inclusive empathy for conflict resolution, we examine whether support for transitional justice mechanisms (TJ) can be predicted by how much an individual perceives inclusive empathy as being shared in their local communities. Our results, based on a probability sample survey in post-war Sri Lanka ( N = 580), reveal that the effects of this perceived communal inclusive empathy can be distinguished from those of personally experienced inclusive empathy, and that the more respondents perceive inclusive empathy as prevalent in their communities, the more they support TJ mechanisms. However, the results also indicate the contextual limits of perceived communal inclusive empathy as a resource for conflict resolution: participants tend to underestimate the prevalence of inclusive empathy, especially in militarized minority communities, and the more they underestimate it, the less they support TJ mechanisms. This study corroborates the importance of social influence in conflict resolution, suggesting that perception of inclusive empathy as shared in one's community is a key determinant of popular support for conflict-transforming policies.

Abstract: The quantitative study examined diversity training and police service differences on levels of ethnocultural empathy among Florida's public university campus police officers. Enrollment in Florida's public universities has increased markedly along all social, cultural, and racial lines during the last decade (State University System of Florida [SUS], 2017). As such, campus police officers must interact more routinely with members of various minority groups. Relationships between police officers and minority members have long been strained by a myriad of social, political, and economic issues (Clayton, 2018). As a result, campus police officers must maintain cultural competence to promote positive relationships within these diverse campus communities (Moule, 2012). The researcher used the model of ethnocultural empathy (MEE) as a conceptual lens to examine the topic (Wang et al., 2003), along with the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE) to collect data relating to ethnocultural empathy levels (Wang et al., 2003) among a small sample (n = 37) of police officers from five public universities in Florida. Ethnocultural empathy is the model's singular concept. Statistical testing compared group differences using independent samples t-tests. The results identified a statistically significant difference relating to an ancillary factor but not in relation to diversity training or police service. The conclusions drawn from the study infer heightened supervisor interest in diversity training development, demographic underrepresentation in Florida's campus police departments, and the need to standardize diversity training curriculum for campus police officers in Florida. The study has implications for researchers, campus police administrators, police trainers, and campus stakeholders. ; by Stefan Wayne Vaughn. ; College of Education and Professional Studies; Department of Educational Research and Administration ; Dissertation (Ed.D.) University of West Florida 2018 ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Also available in print.

Over half of refugees are school-aged children. In host communities, children's attitudes and behaviours are important for the integration of refugee children. This study examines the empathy–attitudes–action model in middle childhood (N = 94, 8 to 11 years old). In both the experimental and control conditions, children were introduced to a (fictional) refugee and told that he or she would be moving to their school. The experimental condition also listened to a storybook about the child's refugee experience. Empathy, outgroup attitudes, and prosocial behaviour toward the incoming child, and refugees as a group, were measured. Although mediation was not supported, the storybook condition reported more empathy and helping intentions, and attitudes predicted helping intentions but not giving to refugees. Results highlight how host-society children can welcome refugees.

The history of humankind is full of examples that indicate a constant desire to make human beings more moral. Nowadays, technological breakthroughs might have a significant impact on our moral character and abilities. This is the case of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The aim of this paper is to consider the ethical aspects of the use of VR in enhancing empathy. First, we will offer an introduction to VR, explaining its fundamental features, devices and concepts. Then, we will approach the characterization of VR as an "empathy machine," showing why this medium has aroused so much interest and why, nevertheless, we do not believe it is the ideal way to enhance empathy. As an alternative, we will consider fostering empathy-related abilities through virtual embodiment in avatars. In the conclusion, however, we will examine some of the serious concerns related to the ethical relevance of empathy and will defend the philosophical case for a reason-guided empathy, also suggesting specific guidelines for possible future developments of empathy enhancement projects through VR embodied experiences. ; Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government FFI2016-79000-P PID2019-104943RB-I00 ; INPhINIT Retaining Fellowship of the La Caixa Foundation LCF/BQ/DR20/11790005

Leadership has frequently employed sport stories and metaphor to exemplify attributes and attitudes that leaders should embrace in order to succeed. Competitive sport entered educational contexts in elite British boarding schools for the very purpose of providing training for future political and corporate leaders. As such, the paradigms for leadership reproduced through sport metaphors have held on to traditional, masculine views of leadership. Yet, these paradigms are outdated and do not fit the values embraced by twenty-first century leadership concepts. New sport metaphors are needed. This article begins the task of shaping new perspectives about leadership from the sport world. Specifically, attitudes and practices of high-performance female ultrarunners provide prime examples of the new lessons for leadership, focusing on empathy as one of the