Situated empathy: The politics and ethics of feeling with the other

Abstract

This paper engages discussions on how empathy figures in research conduct. Its starting point is that while empathetic connections with our interlocutors are usually valorized as both an ethical stance and a way to better relate and understand people we work with, the existing works omit questions of how we actually manage to enact such connections, how are they located vis-à-vis other social and political relations, and what are their possible harmful effects. I draw on my fieldwork among Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and anthropological and feminist scholarship to attend to these issues and further the existing debates by introducing the notion of situated empathy. I show that conceiving empathy in this fashion highlights two aspects important for coming to terms with its role and implications in the research process. First, I propose that empathy is not universalistic but rather a historically and politically contextual practice that requires cognitive and emotional labor, and cannot be divorced from our positionality, personal histories and conditions in which it is employed. Second, because empathy is situated in matrixes of power, it is not necessarily a force for good as it can facilitate violence and deception rather than mutuality and wellbeing. By conceiving of empathy as a situated research practice, we can then arrive at a better appreciation of how particular ways of ‘feeling with the other’ shape our knowledge claims, and how it can facilitate unethical relationships with people we study and work with.