Compassionate care: a moral dimension of nursingThis paper focuses on the concept of compassion and its meaning for nursing practice. Compassion is often considered to be an essential component of nursing care; however, it is difficult to identify what exactly comprises compassionate care. To begin with, there is a general discussion of the meaning of compassion and an examination of its common usage. An argument then is presented that compassion is more than just a natural response to suffering, rather that (...) it is a moral choice. The paper outlines the extent to which this concept has implications for nursing care, highlighting some of the obstacles that nurses need to overcome in order to maintain this essential moral value of the caring role. (shrink)

Affective self-transformation premised on empathy has been understood within feminist and anti-racist literatures as central to achieving social justice. Through juxtaposing debates about empathy within feminist and anti-racist theory with rhetorics of empathy in international development, and particularly writing about ‘immersions’, this article explores how the workings of empathy might be reconceptualised when relations of postcoloniality and neoliberalism are placed in the foreground. I argue that in the neoliberal economy in which the international aid apparatus operates, empathetic self-transformation can become (...) commodified in ways that fix unequal affective subjects. Empathy may function here less to produce more intersubjective relations and ways of knowing than it does to augment the moral and affective capacities of development professionals. Yet, I suggest, it is in the ambivalences, tensions and contradictions of both emotion and neoliberalism that spaces for thinking and feeling transnational encounters differently might be cultivated. (shrink)

This paper addresses three commentaries on Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights. In response to Vittorio Bufacchi, it argues that asking victims to tell their stories needn't be coercive or unjust and that victims are entitled to decide whether and under what conditions to tell their stories. In response to Serene Khader, it argues that empathy with victims' stories can contribute to building a culture of human rights provided that measures are taken to overcome the implicit biases and (...) colonialist interpellations she identifies. In response to Andrea Westlund, it proposes a taxonomy of types of narrative closure and offers some arguments to strengthen her view that empathy with victims' stories endows audience members with a new reason and new motivation to support human rights. (shrink)

Using Iris Marion Young’s framework, this essay looks at racial violence as one of the many “faces” of racial oppression. In the light of this analysis I argue that the fight against racial violence requires much more than identifying the perpetrators of such violence and bringing them to justice; it requires, I argue, thick critical engagements with multiple publics and institutions and with society at large, engagements that are not only cognitive and argumentative but also affective, imaginal, and action-oriented. My (...) argument about the broad range of thick critical engagements needed in anti-racist-violence activism focuses especially on what I term epistemic activism, which refers to the critical activities of denouncing, contesting, and resisting the cognitive-affective attitudes and sensibilities that facilitate complicity with racial oppression and with racial violence. My analysis pays particular attention to the role that affectivity plays in complicity with racial violence and how affective attitudes can be used in epistemic activism to disrupt complicity and to mobilize people in the fight against racial violence. My analysis and argumentation are developed through a case study of epistemic activism: the activism against racial violence in the United States and the changes in public life and institutional recognition that activist organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Equal Justice Initiative have aimed to promote. (shrink)

Education theorists have emphasized that transformative learning is not simply a matter of students gaining access to new knowledge and information, but instead centers upon personal transformation: it alters students’ perspectives, interpretations, and responses. How should learning that brings about this sort of self-transformation be understood from the perspectives of philosophy of mind and cognitive science? Jack Mezirow has described transformative learning primarily in terms of critical reflection, meta-cognitive reasoning, and the questioning of assumptions and beliefs. And within mainstream philosophy (...) of mind, there has been a long-standing assumption that cognition and thought are brain-based, computational, disembodied processes that occur separately from emotion and affect. According to this view, selftransformation might be construed as the forging of new neural connections and the development of new cognitive “programs.” However, I will argue that the literature on embodiment and enactivism that has emerged in recent years offers us a different and more productive way to conceptualize the intended effects of transformative learning. From the standpoint of enactivism, the experience of transformative learning is thoroughly bound up with the cognitive shifts that it involves, and it also involves significant changes to the neurobiological dynamics of the living body. Moreover, personal transformation is not simply something that happens to subjects, but rather a process in which they are actively and dynamically engaged. In addition, this enactivist approach emphasizes that the learning process is fully embodied and fundamentally affective. From a phenomenological perspective, personal transformation can be understood as a pronounced alteration in cognitive-affective orientation; and from a neurobiological perspective, the development of new habits of mind can be understood as the formation of highly integrated patterns of bodily engagement and response. The upshot is that it is not just subjects’ brains that are altered over the course of transformative learning, but also their overall bodily and affective attunement to their surroundings. (shrink)

This paper adopts the view promoted by early modern philosopher Adam Smith that exercises of the sympathetic imagination play an important role in supporting human sociability and ethical behaviour. It argues that such exercises have potential to significantly change the way in which privileged racial identities relate to marginalised and devalued racial identities. First, the paper draws on Sally Haslanger’s reflections upon her lived experience of transracial parenting to illustrate how sympathetic identification with the experiences of a differently racialized individual (...) can transform the way in which we relate to entire racial groups. Haslanger’s account demonstrates the potential for exercises of the sympathetic imagination to disrupt the way in which we experience our own embodiment, and to generate a form of knowledge that implicates our sense of self and will to act. Second, the paper discusses some limitations of appealing to sympathy as a social resource in less intimate contexts. This discussio... (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of epistemic apprenticeship as a response to failures among privileged social actors to perceive the knowledge bases of unjustly marginalised groups as sources of valuable insight. Inspired by Elizabeth Spelman’s reflections on apprenticeship and intersectional feminism, an epistemic apprenticeship represents an obverse form of apprenticeship; one in which socially privileged knowers become apprentices to those who do not enjoy equivalent power and privilege. This paper critiques and extends Spelman’s account of apprenticeship by focussing on how (...) the institutional sedimentation of dominant social imaginaries works against the volitional and virtuous practice of apprenticeship, and by exploring what a commitment to epistemic apprenticeship demands at the level of institutional practice. As part of this discussion, I scrutinise the conditions under which institutionalised apprenticeships may fall short of their meliorative potential, and may obstruct rather than aid efforts to achieve greater epistemic justice. (shrink)

In Coalescent Argumentation, Michael Gilbert comes closest to the ethical with the idea and role empathy plays within his scheme. Empathy is an act of will which one need never do. Rather than from need, it stems from a desire for the other pe rson. I would call this desire ethical. However, Gilbert understands empathy in cognitive terms. I am interested in seeing just what kinds of difference a more ethical interpretation of empathy would yield. Here I will be drawing (...) on contemporary conti nental and feminist work. (shrink)