Description
In an age of aggressive partisanship and escalating political hostility, the concept of empathy has re-emerged as both a locus of political hope and an object of critical interrogation with regard to its political utility. This conference invites graduate students and early-career faculty to reconceptualize empathy and other potentially political affects not as fixed dispositions or moral injunctions, but as belonging to a contested field of political affect and agency.
In an everyday sense, empathy refers to a sense of shared feeling with another person, often in the context of suffering or struggle; it also, however, denotes a range of concepts and practices through which individuals navigate intersubjectivity and alterity in personal and political domains. From its theorized evolutionary function—as the cognitive capacity to inhabit the perspective of another, foundational to human development (Tomasello 2009)—to its role as an artistic, ethical, and political mechanism, empathy enables the transgression of disciplinary, ideological, and cultural boundaries. Yet this apparent ubiquity conceals a fundamental ambivalence: is empathy an inherent human faculty, or a historically and culturally contingent mode of relationality? How is it different from other affects that, in different historical and cultural contexts, connect us to others–e.g., pity, rage, love, or contempt?
Papers will examine both the emancipatory potentials and the political instrumentalization of affects within dominant discourses. We are particularly interested in the ways empathy intersects with agency, shaping individual and collective practices across diverse social, political, and artistic domains, also in comparison to other affects. The conference aims to interrogate the historical, theoretical, and affective dimensions of empathy, posing questions such as: Under what conditions can empathy be politically transformative? When might it serve to reinforce dominant ideologies? What genres and media cultivate or block empathy? How do other affects perform or hinder these operations?
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers from early-career scholars– graduate students and junior faculty– from literary studies, political theory, philosophy, performance studies, anthropology, and related fields. The conference will take place on October 2-3, 2025, at the University of California, Berkeley, and will bring together participants from UC Berkeley and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Our aim is to foster collaboration between partner institutions while offering early-career researchers the opportunity to engage in an international scholarly network.
Application Requirements
- Short conference paper proposal (350 words) responding to the above call.
- Curriculum Vitae
Application Deadline
- Deadline: May 15, 2025.
- Applications must be submitted by email as a single PDF document to UCB-LMU-Exchange@berkeley.edu.
Funding
- UC Berkeley graduate students whose proposals are accepted will receive a $500 award.
