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EMPATHY IS OFTEN INVOKED in social justice educational discourse and practice as an indispensable emotion for working across differences. As Megan Boler writes: “in the last fifteen years in Western ‘multiculturalism,’ empathy is promoted as a bridge between differences, the affective reason for engaging in democratic dialogue with the other.”1 The idea is that the more we feel with an other, the better we are able to have a sense of what matters to her and, consequently, come to understand and engage with her better.This indeed is the explicit moral emphasis granted to empathy in social justice education : that empathy leads to a better kind of responsivity and, by extension, responsibility. Within the discourse of ethics, empathy has been identified as having significance for moral sensibility, lending philosophical support to those educational practices. In Kantian terms, for instance, empathy (or fellow -feeling) is understood to be an aid to, if not a sufficient condition for, moral sensibility;2 in terms of an ethic of care, empathy is seen to be, along with reciprocity and engrossment, one of the emotional qualities that allows for appropriate, caring attention to develop.3 Empathy, then, is not simply considered to be one affective response among many, but it is seen to have ethical legitimation in a way that other emotions, such as pity and guilt, do not usually enjoy. In fact, viewed as an explicitly moral emotion, empathy is the very form of attachment seen to be necessary for living responsibly together, and it is this emphasis on what empathy brings to our sense of togetherness that, to my mind, has made it so prevalent within educational projects committed to social justice. In seeking to make students aware of everyday occurrences of inequity and social violence, educators frequently rely on students’ capacities for feeling that 43 TWO BEING-FOR OR FEELING-FOR? EMPATHIC DEMANDS AND DISRUPTIONS they can share in another’s experience and come to understand better what the nature of that experience might be like. Consider the following two examples. First, knowing my interest in these issues, an acquaintance once explained to me a classroom exercise in which one of her nieces was expected to participate. For one full day, this class of third graders (from a relatively affluent school in Toronto) was told to refrain from eating any food. The students were to return to school the next day and reflect on their experiences of hunger: what it felt like, how they managed. The apparent aim of the exercise was to encourage children to better understand what Third World hunger was like. Through experiencing and reflecting on their own hunger, presumably they would gain insight into what starving children4 —whom they have never met or with whom they had never spoken—must be feeling. (It is probably safe to speculate that there was also an insistence to some extent on the degree to which their hunger was so much less dire than that of their Third World peers.) Second, I asked a colleague who had been instrumental in developing curriculum on the Holocaust for high school students what she had hoped to achieve. Aside from the more obvious goal to promote historical knowledge in order to prevent such events from taking place again, she declared to me that one of her aims had been to “educate empathy” in the students. As I understood it at the time, this was rendered in terms of developing in the students a competence in feeling with others who suffered. Not that they would be asked to experience suffering themselves through some kind of simulation exercise,5 but that through images, testimony, and texts, the students would be “encouraged” to emotionally attach and connect with the victims through empathic means. This type of connection, it was thought, would then presumably lead to an increased sense of responsibility for those who had suffered , even if they were not directly the cause of that suffering.6 While these anecdotes are by no means definitive in terms of the range of curricular and pedagogical demands for empathy, they nonetheless do represent a common tactic to produce a particular emotion within an overall strategy of social justice. That is, pedagogical practices through which empathy is demanded are indeed “tactical”; that is, they focus on the ways in which empathy can be deployed to challenge conventional knowledge and alter students ’ egos. As de Certeau defines it, a tactic is a “calculated action” that “boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order...

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