Empathy and Indifference – Emotional/Affective Routes To and Away from Compassion I
My Session Status
There is an increasing interest in how emotion is a form of judgement on things that affect our lives, identity and wellbeing. This session focuses on the issue of empathy, the emotional and imaginative skill to place oneself in the subjective position of another. Significant debate has occurred within the wider social sciences that has dismissed empathy as simply a feel-good way of belittling or dismissing social justice issues and thus maintain an individual and societal indifference to the marginalized. Conversely, others have argued that empathy is key to overturning indifference and effecting political and social changes. Overall, this session asks what role(s) can and does heritage, in its various forms, play in engendering empathy, and what might an examination of the ways in which heritage and empathy interact reveal about the utility or otherwise about forms and experiences of empathy? Equally, what may the study of the emotional content of heritage practices and performances tell us about the maintenance of indifference?
This session calls for papers, that explicitly address not just the emotional content of heritage practices, but clearly explore the ways in which heritage is used in a range of contexts to elicit or withhold empathy, and the consequences this has for social debates and individual and collective well-being.
Papers may explore such things as:
● the idea of empathy and its role in the expression of different forms of heritage;
● the way empathy, or its withholding, can be used to either facilitate or closedown the extension of social recognition in heritage and museum contexts;
● how forms of commemoration can re-assert or challenge dominant historical or heritage narratives;
● how people using heritage sites or museums, or debating issues of historical importance, mobilize particular suites of emotional and affective responses to the past;
● how communities or other groups who propose non-authorized versions of heritage/history utilize emotional and affective responses to challenge received narratives about the past;
● research which critically investigates the empathetic responses of "visitors" to heritage sites, museums and other forms of heritage;
● research which investigates the role of empathy in the expression and transference of intangible heritage.
Sub Sessions
At recent Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) and Archives and Records Association of New Zealand (ARANZ) conferences, powerful presentations on the emotional impacts of records and archives moved many participants. Archivists could not escape hearing of the brutality of their systems in imprisoning the subjects of records as “perpetual mementos of the official gaze” and denying any agency in records creation nor in subsequent decision-making on ongoing management, access, and use. They...
Research involving display analysis and interviews with staff and visitors has shown empathy to be an important feature of interpretative strategies in museums addressing migration. Studies also suggest that this topic is predisposed to encourage emotional and affective responses. More specifically, it appears that some audio-visual interpretive strategies may be especially effective at encouraging visitors to engage empathetically with “others.” Studies foreground the affective qualities ...
Zongzu (宗族, the parental lineage group) as a traditional Chinese way of holding people together by means of descent lines and blood ties, had been cancelled since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. Especially during the Cultural Revolution, zongzu was viewed as “backward” and “feudal.” However, since the reform and open policy, the non-authorized reconstruction of zongzu has been reappearing, especially in southern China. Taking zongzu as a cultural heritage, this p...
The tension between tourism and heritage has existed for a long time. From practical-based understanding of heritage, most literature concerned with management issues attempts to interpret the relationship between heritage and tourism. Tourists are routinely defined as causing economic commodification, pollution, and physical damage to sites, and they obscure or erode other values of heritage. Most importantly, tourists have been defined as “culturally inauthentic” and as passive sightseer...
Temporality is a key figure in contemporary tourism. Phrases and images such as “where time has stood still” or “past pristine landscapes” are commonly used to inspire potential travellers to “get away from it all.” Alternative tourism (ecotourism, pro-poor tourism, community-based tourism, etc.), which depends on a strong rhetoric of positive contribution and compassion, has been particularly keen to use temporal metaphors, and to incorporate heritage sites in their travel routes. Governm...
This paper explores the role that empathy, as both a skill and an emotion, plays in the processes of politicized and self-conscious heritage-making among visitors to heritage sites and museums in the United States, England, and Australia. Debates about the role of empathy in museology and heritage studies have tended to focus on the utility of empathy for triggering “learning” experiences in heritage and museum visitors. Some commentators, David Lowenthal most notably among them, have argu...
Now in a transitional phase between violence and established peace, Northern Ireland is dealing with the legacy of forty years of conflict. Memorials, archives and museums have been presented as a means to share experiences, get others to forge an emotional connection, and evoke understanding of past suffering. In these cases the human stories of individual experiences, and tangible objects used as evidence, become a tantalizing record with memorial status and museums places where this can...
Heritage practices of making meaning through and with the past are inherently pedagogical, bringing the past to bear on the present in ways intended to create the conditions for desired futures. In an “age of testimony” and of increased skepticism regarding the “global rush to commemorate atrocities,” encounters with traumatic pasts in heritage and museological practices of public history need to be studied in terms of their volatile affective heritage and the intense emotion they provoke....