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January 19th, 2012 at 8pm

Speaker

Marissa Barnes, York University

Title

"Could the ‘true’ empathy please stand up”? Does empathy suffer from a ‘multiple-identity disorder’?

Abstract

Empathy is used and studied widely across disciplines—from the biological sciences to media studies—it is a struggle to find any area within academia that doesn’t have something to say about it. Moreover, empathy also has a place of prominence in everyday parlance and popular culture discourses. Yet, despite its widespread use, empathy’s “cache value” (in terms of clarity of meaning) is lacking. What exactly is this thing called “empathy”? After the heyday of attempts, between the 1950s and 1990s, to define empathy with precision, most contemporary researchers and theorists would be comfortable with the assertion that empathy is multilevel or that there are different types. Although Batson (2009) has identified eight distinct phenomena that are called empathy, there still remains the suggestion that what is needed is a unified theory of its nature.

My search for an understanding of the multiple meanings of empathy began in 2007 and in this presentation I will discuss the structure of my dissertation. I have proposed a number of different identities of empathy and I will discuss my rationale for this: tracing from the biography of empathy, to the biographies of empathies, and finally to the multiple identities of empathies. I suggest that the multiple identities inherent in empathy are neither pathology nor disorder; rather, it is the amorphous nature of this concept which gives it cultural power and makes it so useful.

 

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