Power and pedagogic failure: Seeking a politics of empathy towards an anti-racist academy

Abstract

This article reflects on the challenges of developing anti-racist commitments in a UK university during and ‘post’ pandemic and re-envisions pedagogic failure in this context. Tackling racism requires that our conversations start from a recognition that we are always situated in relationship not just to others but to the structures and cultures of our environments and communities. There are long histories of empathy and its role, risks and limits in intersectional understandings of the transformation of inequalities. We contend that empathy is integral to anti-racist pedagogies because it: centres relationality in critical and reflective learning; has the capacity to be subversive through its challenge to the ‘dominant transmission model of education prevalent in the neoliberal colonial university’; reveals how the university acts upon and works to erase consciousness of our emotional and embodied selves, and has the capacity to unsettle our epistemic horizons to reveal our complicity in colonial practices. Developing a dialogue between the co-authors who worked on a small, funded project on anti-racist learning within a UK Russell Group university in 2022–2023, the article explores the barriers experienced, along with the possibility of constituting ‘generative and fulfilling spaces’.

Introductions

I was educated and trained into a discipline that largely erased race from its own teachings and for a long time I didn’t question this disciplinary narrative. In conversation Sophia asked, “Why not?” The question revealed the extent of the success of the “disciplining” of the discipline and the reification of whiteness of which I am a part.

(Naomi)

It all started with care, and the lack thereof.

(Sophia)

As co-authors we write with multiple voices in this article. We cannot reconcile our voices into a singular whole because to do so would be to erase the positionalities that we are writing from. Instead, we move between our own voices and our shared argument because these differences of experience, learning, and reflection are constitutive of the journey undertaken between us. Our focus is an exploration of a project which focused on developing anti-racist learning through the lens of a politics of empathy in a UK Russell Group university in 2022–2023. ¹ The story we share is about the hidden structures and norms embedded in the neoliberal, colonial academy that work to resist radical change and may be experienced as pedagogic failure. This story emerges through the learnings from the project that served as impetus for our work. Writing this article was a practice of re-interpreting perceptions of failure; understanding failure as shaped by structural barriers to change is an important step in understanding how institutions act upon our emotional and relational selves. Failure – whether through repeated thwarted efforts or unmet goals – is a visceral experience felt in the body through emotional and physical states of discomfort, pain, and suffering (Nagoski and Nagoski, 2020). It may be articulated, for example, as anxiety around professional expectations, metrics, consequences, disappointment, anger, and frustration or shame at feeling that we have let down ourselves or our colleagues; in other words, emotional, psychological, and physical distress experienced in varied ways. However, individualizing failure as an embodied and emotional experience also serves to conceal the structural conditions within which individuals are acting while inhibiting change. Although drawn from a particular context, we believe that these experiences may resonate across institutions more widely.

First, we share intellectual and personal introductions, recognizing that our identities and experiences shape our understanding of and critical orientation to the project. Second, we briefly introduce the project. Third, we draw on the concept of ‘testimonial empathy’, understood as shaped by radical reflexivity and the capacity to reach across both interpersonal and structural dimensions of experience and injustice (Head, 2020b), as integral to an ethics of encounter for anti-racist work. Finally, we reflect on challenges to anti-racist work by conceptualizing institutional barriers to substantive change as a form of embodied and relational betrayal, before focusing on three specific barriers. In closing, we identify generative partnerships that transformed this project into a set of relationships rather than outcomes, arguing that anti-racism is “slow work” (Intro, this SI) that needs to be situated within an ontological and epistemological framework that challenges the ‘business as usual’ approach of the academy.

Naomi:

The discipline of International Relations in which I became an academic in 15 years ago was built upon the colonial foundations of European and state-centric dominance. It centred knowledge production grounded within a Cartesian mind-body distinction which largely excluded emotions and bodies, and it took for granted whiteness as a non-racialized and naturalized norm and structure of privilege that maintained its hegemonic authority and legitimacy. Since then, scholarship in International Relations has been changing radically, challenging its ‘origin’ theories, epistemologies, and history, and calling for a decolonising approach to the production of knowledge. This work continues to push me to read differently and explore scholarship that disrupts and re-frames my understanding of history, politics and the discipline of IR. Making connections between a politics of empathy and anti-racist pedagogy largely emerged through three connected pathways.

The first influence came from critical social theory during my PhD. Reading theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young, Axel Honneth, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer gave me an appreciation for the connections between theory and practice that are always already shaped by dynamics of power and intersubjectivity (Head, 2012). However, the limitations in this literature regarding emotions and bodies in conjunction with the wider liberal hegemony of a rationalist human subject, pointed to important historical and intellectual silences. This led to a second influence, exploring multi-disciplinary debates on emotions, notably in feminism and cultural studies where scholars have long been making connections between social justice, inequalities, bodies and emotions. My research focused on the politics of empathy which engages with difficult – and often violent – questions of vulnerability, identity and belonging, the sources and legacies of knowledge and authority that perpetuate dynamics of power, and the everyday emotional and embodied experiences of (in)security. The third pathway was undertaking research and teaching on conflict and experiential learning in the context of Palestine and Israel which led to thinking about learning and reflexivity as a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ (Boler, 1999; Head, 2020a). Focusing not just on cognitive understandings of the world but the emotional investments underpinning our ideological commitments and beliefs, discomfort is present through grappling with our subsequent uncertainty, dismantling previously taken-for-granted knowledges, attending to the inequity of vulnerabilities and the power of voice and representation. I learned alongside and in dialogue with my students and we grappled with the failures and limits of our learning (Head, 2020a).

This experiential journey deepened my understanding and acknowledgement of the pedagogic and political responsibilities which emerge through the act of locating myself within the world. Conceptualizing empathy as the possibility of epistemic and ontological learning, there is both an intellectual commitment and a form of praxis motivating this work. I suggest that sitting with the discomfort of rupture, responsibility, and lack of certainty produced by situating ourselves within these continuing structures of injustice has the potential to invoke and provoke a radical reflexivity essential to ethical encounters with others. Practicing this commitment is a daily challenge to learn to see, think, hear, feel and know differently.

Sophia:

The memory that has been visiting me as I write this and struggle to find my voice after the metaphorical – but very real – wounding of my throat, is the one where my mother and I were fighting about the time I spent studying. For better or worse, I studied very little while going through grade school. My parents used ableist terms to motivate me to study more. It was ironic that it was my mother most of all since she was the one that ‘was most like me’. At least, that’s what loved ones always said.

I couldn’t understand why I needed to learn things I wasn’t interested in and entered yet another heated discussion about the importance of education. We were in our third home by this time, so I must have been around 14 years old. I remember, vividly, her frank response. ‘They will take anything from you. You don’t understand yet, but the world will take everything They can from you. The one thing They cannot take will be your knowledge’.

My life was never separate from politics, no matter my age. Lacking the vocabulary perceived necessary to be intelligible, I was told that I didn’t understand. It’s ironic, because I think that if I was given the language, adults would have found that I understood perfectly. I was living it, embodying it; and I continue to unearth all the ways that I do so. As Hedva (2022) lovingly puts it, I was a Sick Woman from the moment I was conceived. Since I did not have access to the words that would render me intelligible, I was at the mercy of my caregivers to find ways to understand me. With hindsight, I realise that this looming ‘They’ can, in fact, take your knowledge. They can take it any moment, for any reason, especially if you are not part of the few that can be identified as They (Hlabangane, 2021).

I found myself navigating the academy for over a decade to become intelligible, and repeatedly learned that knowledge is something that is shaped, moulded, given, taken, and even denied. The epistemic injustice I faced as a student meant that I could never know; only ever learn. As a patient, it meant that I did not know my body or mind. As a child, I was too innocent to know the world. As a ‘tomboy’, I was too feminine to know what action would look like, and too masculine to know what resting would look like. As a neurodivergent, what I meant somehow wasn’t in what I said, nor could I take what others said at face value. As a melanated person, the knowledge I did have was too angry – and that is if they acknowledged I had any knowledge at all.

One of modernity’s legacies is, as Audre Lorde said in an interview, that there is “always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself – whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. – because that’s the piece that they need to key into. They want to dismiss everything else” (Hammond, 1981). By never being perceived as intelligent enough due to my colour (colourism, racism), my sex (sexism), the way I was gendered by the world (queer/trans/femmephobia), my precarious economic status (classism), and my neurodivergence (ableism), I experienced oppression at once, and in contradictory ways. All rooted in care, and the lack thereof, for who I am and my proximity to Blackness. To be clear, I do not consider myself Black as I do not have a shared history of enslavement at the epicentre of my identity (Whitaker, 2022). Claiming Blackness for myself in its entirety instead of my proximity to it would be dishonest at best and contributing to the social death of Black people at worst (Zondi, 2021). By orienting myself in relation to Blackness, and decentring whiteness, the fog begins to clear around the ‘ground zero’ of white supremacy and the institutional violence that colonised peoples face when confronting the normalised ways of being that allows coloniality to endure (Hoagland, 2020).

By the time I met Naomi and started getting to know her, the toll of the insistent institutional violence that I faced over 3 decades was finally overwhelming me. The UK’s racism is so successful at its racial gaslighting (Johnson et al., 2021; Sweet, 2019) that I was unable to trust people that looked like me because they too questioned my knowledge of the situation despite also experiencing the effects of white supremacy. I was unable to keep up the façade of being intelligible in a way that would humanise me enough to be able to live up to all my academic acknowledgements of having obtained legitimised knowledge. I was becoming used to the way that I was expected to bear the responsibility of navigating whiteness and people’s (un)comfortability of reckoning with coloniality. In this way, even my humanity is ‘a fragile condition and an uncertain reality’ (Mpofu and Steyn, 2021: 1). Through reorienting my relationship to Blackness, it becomes clear that I will never truly be in proximity to whiteness, and thus I choose to reject modernity’s demand that I reassimilate whiteness as the norm.

The project

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (2019) and Universities UK (2020) have reported the presence of systemic racism within the UK higher education sector (see also Sian, 2019; Open Letter on Racial Justice in UK Higher Education, 2020; Virdee et al., 2021). The EHRC inquiry revealed that many managers ‘struggled to understand and empathise with experiences of everyday racism’ (2019: 69) and Universities UK’s report concluded that ‘many university staff had difficulties empathising with the experience of Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff and were not aware of the impacts of white privilege’ (2020).

Prompted by pandemic-fueled anger at the scope of injustice highlighted in these reports in conjunction with the findings of the University of Glasgow’s own report on racism experienced within the institution (Virdee et al., 2021), I, Naomi, put together a small grant application for a project entitled, “‘Let’s talk about race’: tackling racism in the University community.” Funded for 9 months through the University of Glasgow’s ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, the proposal sought to contribute to creating a safe and democratic environment where people would feel able to speak about how they are unevenly impacted by structural and institutional oppression through a collaborative and facilitated dialogue process underpinned by a critical and feminist understanding of empathy. I believed that for the university to be an anti-racist institution, a process of deep, continuous (un)learning and reflection across the academic body was needed alongside policy and strategic changes. This involves naming whiteness as central to structural and systemic racism, and understanding how whiteness works in every aspect of our everyday professional lives through disciplinary knowledge, research practices, methods, research supervision and training, teaching and assessment practices, staff and student support services, student recruitment, retention, and experience strategies, leadership practices, hiring and promotion strategies, management structures and institutional culture (see, e.g. Ahmed, 2007; Arday et al., 2021; Bhambra et al., 2018; Buckner et al., 2021; Decolonising SOAS Working Group, 2018; Delatolla et al., 2021; Hall et al., 2021; Rublee et al., 2023; Sian, 2019; Tate and Bagguley, 2017). The challenge lies in recognising that whiteness “is not just an empirical ‘fact’ but a container of emotions, of legacies, and of historical associations with power” (Gani and Khan, 2024: 9). The project’s intention was to make a small contribution to an institutional culture of learning, dialogue and action that supported anti-racist knowledges, practices and policies. This was based on the belief that tackling racism requires our conversations to start from a recognition that we are always situated in relationship to others and to the structures, histories, and cultures of our environments and communities. Acknowledging that pre-determined outcomes as required for the process of grant applications became part of the challenge for the project, this set of reflections identifies structures and norms we experienced that work to slow or block radical change within the academy. This reflective process enabled a re-thinking of perceptions of ‘failure’ to represent our findings as much as the activities of the project. ²

Theorising an ethics of encounter: Testimonial empathy

There are long histories of empathy and its role, risks and limits, in feminist and intersectional scholarship concerning the transformation of socio-political oppression (Ahmed, 2004; Boler, 1997; Chabot Davis, 2004; Pedwell, 2012; Rodino-Colocino, 2018; Whitehead, 2012; Segal, 2011; Givens, 2021). Empathy is an important dimension of learning and engagement which has the capacity to connect interpersonal relations with structural dynamics of power (Head, 2016a, 2016b, 2020a, 2020b). Empathy asks that we work to understand the world of others as they experience it rather than projecting our own positions of privilege, (in)security, or (in)ability. It means listening hard to those who may not be like us, as well as reflecting on our own positions, hierarchies, and actions that have contributed to ongoing experiences of harm or suffering, often without cognizance or intention. It is central to our capacity to hold multiple perspectives and experiences with care and a recognition that our task is ‘to learn how to hear what is impossible. Such [a]. . . hearing is only possible if we respond to a pain that we cannot claim as our own’ (Ahmed, 2004: 35). This kind of listening requires a willingness to be changed by what is heard and is integral to a societal ability to engage with pluralism, power, and complexity. Recognising that historically-derived structural inequalities in our societies are affectively constructed and maintained, we need affective skills and understanding to dismantle them as well as to acknowledge our complicity in maintaining them.

As King (1964) said, ‘I believe what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up’. Indeed, I, Sophia, suggest that when people in closer proximity to whiteness do not experience the world in the same way as marginalised groups, and do not realize that discrimination is an everyday experience for people without access to power or privilege, they are contributing to the ongoing suffering experienced as a consequence of structural injustice. When we actively choose to decentre whiteness, we invite Black and Brown peoples’ presence into our lives. We can make the choice to no longer exclude racialised people from our everyday lives in ways that contribute to the disappearance of their existence from the world. We can reorient our relationship to Blackness to remain in relationship with racialised people to disrupt and uproot the normalised, everyday ways that coloniality has come to live in our bodies and contribute to racialised people’s erasure.

Recognising this call for decentring whiteness and centring the possibility of being in relationship with others, testimonial empathy ‘offers a more radical and reflexive engagement with others which places greater emphasis on listening with humility, a recognition of asymmetric vulnerabilities, a recognition of the distance between listener and narrator, and a willingness to position and interrogate the self within these global interconnections’ (Head, 2020b: 340). Testimonial empathy directly addresses the interpersonal encounter which produces racial harassment and the denial of voice and discrimination. Simultaneously, building on Young’s (2004, 2006) social connection model of political responsibility (Head, 2020b), testimonial empathy requires us to examine and acknowledge our own investments in the structural and institutional oppression through which harassment, silencing, and discrimination is facilitated and legitimated. The narrative of the particular remains in relationship to broader structures of power.

This urgent reorientation towards relationality that reaches through and across the structural and interpersonal is reflected in Butler’s (2020) argument for a politics and ethics of nonviolence that centres interdependency as a constitutive feature of social relations and as essential to re-imagining equality. Crucially, Butler (2020: 63) notes, ‘To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the form of the blow; the institutional forms through which it operates compels us to ask: Whose life appears as a life, and whose loss would register as a loss? How does that demographic imaginary function in ethics, in policy, and in politics?’ This question cuts to the heart of relationality and its practice within universities seeking to build anti-racist communities. Liberal individualism – central to the structures and pedagogies of Westernised universities – sustains notions of the ‘self’ which can ‘function as a kind of regime, including as part of its extended self all those who bear similitude to one’s color, class, and privilege, thus expelling from the regime of the subject/self all those marked by difference within that economy’ (Butler, 2020: 12). The violence of systemic racism reveals the demographic precondition of grievability; not all lives are considered equally valuable – and therefore worthy of empathy – in their living or loss. The individualistic notion of the ‘self’ therefore sustains forms of historical inequality that establish some lives as more liveable and grievable than others (2020: 17). We suggest the university as an institution underpinned by liberal individualist notions of success, knowledge, and authority, cannot escape the questions prompted by Butler’s reasoning in the context of (anti-)racism.

This linkage between the interpersonal and structural dimensions of racism is essential to supporting sustainable transformation. As Schick (2022: 98) argues, an ‘agonistic conception of recognition is not only about meeting others in the classroom space; it is also about meeting our selves and becoming aware of the desires that underpin our refusal of recognition, which manifest in the ignorance of and indifference towards others’. This echoes Boler’s call for us ‘to recognize [ourselves] as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront’ (Boler, 1997: 263). Such a conception of recognition which emerges from being-in-relationship is integral to a politics of empathy and, we think, to the work of anti-racism. To be oriented towards anti-racist work, empathy must be grounded in an ongoing recognition of and reparation for the unequal dynamics of power that shape our workplace culture, environment, and opportunities. As such, we acknowledge the primary responsibility for engaging in testimonial empathy to decentre whiteness as a norm lies with white people while, simultaneously, centring the work of racialised groups to organise, advocate and resist the legacies of systemic racism.

‘At the heart of this is betrayal’: Building relational communities

I feel like I’ve reached something of a turning point in the last few weeks. I had been sitting in a place of individual failure, feeling like I wasn’t going to be able to deliver on what I’d promised. Talking with others helped me to realise that what I had individualised was, at least in part, a set of structural barriers.

(Naomi)

For me, it didn’t come as a surprise that the institution had set [Naomi] up to fail, that she witnessed and experienced institutional betrayal (Carroll, 2017). In my experience, it was inevitable since she had the choice to merely accept that the institution could only change very little and only needed cosmetic changes – and she rejected it. Witnessing Naomi’s struggle against the system when I was also incapacitated only made me feel more helpless, worrying that I would be deemed a waste of a hire (racial ableist classism). That moment didn’t come for me, but I still wait for the shoe to drop.

(Sophia) ³

While the following discussion does not reflect the full set of challenges we each experienced or the wider set of issues and literature that could be addressed in this context, we explore some of the barriers identified during the project to reflect on ways in which universities as institutions perpetuate limits to effective anti-racist change. We conceptualize institutional barriers to substantive change as a form of betrayal that is an embodied and relational experience. Betrayal, we argue, is constituted by experiences of anti-racist work that refuse or disregard the interdependency required for radical equality (Butler, 2020), that do not ground their activities within a feminist ethics and politics of care (Mountz et al., 2015), or do not engage with the inner and relational work necessary to address the legacy of a system of knowledge production that privileges whiteness and the individualised ‘self’ (see Delatolla et al., 2021). We address three specific barriers to anti-racist work: unmet expectations of relationality, funding structures and inadequate forms of recognition.

When institutions establish commitments regarding anti-racism, they acknowledge the harm that structural injustice has done and continues to do to the individuals and communities that institutions are in relationship with. This creates expectations of accountability within those relationships and expectations of an ethics of care in challenging the precarity and marginalization of racialized staff and students. Understanding the experiences of marginalized others in deeply asymmetrical structures of power calls for the development of ‘a culture that. . . engages in ongoing reflection that combines critique and vulnerability’ (Coles, 2022: 37). Working with deeply felt and embodied experiences of racism and privilege touches on painful aspects of ourselves and others; they reflect (un)conscious emotional investments and norms and require care-full work that offers space for curiosity and attention to personal and differentiated experiences.

As outlined in the discussion of testimonial empathy, this work centres an ontological and epistemological transformation of the self and the self-other relationship. Yet, this imperative for radical reflexivity is often hard to put into action; it comes up against existing professional and institutional hierarchies, identities and structures of authority within committees, groups, and communities. While commitment to anti-racism is often declared, the belief that the situated self (ourself) is integral to the process of change is limited. This implies change should happen ‘out there’ rather than in the ongoing discomfort of reckoning with our own complicity. Pushback against those advocating for critical self-reflection as part of the process of change may render those challenging power further marginalized. Prioritising technical and impersonal strategies of change over processes of deep and continuous learning by individuals and communities within institutions can contribute to unmet expectations of relationality. Taken together, these experiences may constitute a form of betrayal.

Funding structures can be a further structural barrier, with opportunities often ensuring that funds remain at least partially within the institution. In addition, when equitable models of institutional payment for external community partners are absent, this signals who may be recognized as producing knowledge and whose expertise is valued. It requires individuals seeking to recognize the expertise and knowledges of practitioners to focus on the time-consuming administrative work and emotional labour of persuasion necessary to set up payment processes. Additionally, funding cycles generally require pre-determined and measurable outputs and linear timeframes, limiting capacity for slow reflection and foreclosing the likelihood of explorative collaboration and learning that allows for trial and error. This also increases the degree to which work is understood as a pursuit of individual academic distinction through measures of success such as outputs, income and impact and increases the stakes of ‘failure’. This narrows the incentives for pursuing the collective and mutual responsibility for internal cultural change constituted by an ontological and epistemological orientation to openness and curiosity.

Institutional models for recognition of informal but substantive anti-racist work within universities are also often insufficient. Outwith the formal roles allocated to those with responsibilities for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion activities, the everyday embodied and emotional work of developing anti-racist practice, sharing knowledges, building communities of practice, self-education and reflection remains largely invisible labour. This contributes to maintaining fragmented, often uncoordinated and siloed efforts for internal change, thus creating further barriers for bottom-up initiatives to become sustainable and effective. In the current working conditions of higher education this has consequences for who is able and willing to engage in these activities which, in turn, preserves the status quo whereby highly individualized REF-able outputs, grant income, and impact remains substantially more incentivized academic labour. This leads to work that is frequently gendered, racialized, and reliant on good will (often of precarious or early career staff), setting up individuals for (normalized) overwork. Ultimately, this fails to equitably embed the ongoing relational work that names whiteness as a structure of power within which we are unequally located, and which works to reflect on and ‘undo’ the legacies and culture of the neoliberal and colonial academy within our everyday academic activities and relationships. The question of who, why and when work/research/activism that challenges systemic racism in universities gets recognition points to the power-laden issue of who decides what the appropriate metrics of success are in the academy and if/when they are met.

Even if this work is materially recognized, a question remains whether it would be able to escape re-assimilation into the existing structures of meaning and value shaped by outputs, income, and impact. This was a pressure which I, Naomi, felt as the only source of funding available for the project was intended to support the development of REF Impact case studies. This reflects the ‘double bind’ faced by ‘cultural critics who attempt to contest the operations of power within their own institutional contexts’ (Gandhi, 2019: 59). As Cornel West argues, ‘while linking their activities to the fundamental, structural overhaul of these institutions, they often remain financially dependent on them . . .For these critics of culture, theirs is a gesture that is simultaneously progressive and coopted’ (West, 190: 94, cited in Gandhi, 2019: 50).

Working out the muscle of reflexivity: A work in progress

It becomes clear that care work – in a world where epistemology and ontology is so disconnected – is feminised, racialised, lived, embodied. The choice to provide care is a profound decision that either bridges the gap between thinking and doing or continues the violent dismemberment of the feminised/racialised/pathologized beings that have and continue to endure the trauma of (de)colonisation.

(Sophia)

Recognising that an inability to achieve the project outcomes as initially defined was not simply a question of individual failure allowed for a re-centring of relationality which contributed to the slow work of finding allies and of reckoning with the plausible pace and scope of this work. I, Naomi, recognised that focusing on systemic issues requires people to be willing to challenge their own participation in the collective agreements not to see/know which allow a distancing of the self from the problem of systemic racism (Fierke and Mackay, 2023). I also fell into the trap of urgency linked to the linear, short-term, and impact-oriented focus of the funding, as well as succumbing to the ‘productivity’ imperative of academic time which failed to reckon with the gentle time required for the deep cultural work needed to re-make academic structures (Mountz et al., 2015: 1238; Schick and Timperley, 2022). The wisdom to see this trap for what it was and to re-frame it through an understanding of the structural barriers it embodied emerged through generous conversations with community anti-racist and equalities practitioners working within and adjacent to the university.

Focusing instead on finding allies to overcome the dispersed and fragmented nature of existing anti-racist work within the institution led to developing generative relationships with community members who have long been challenging structures of power through practices that resonate with testimonial empathy. These iterative conversations recognised the presence of obligations emerging from past, present, and future relationships that are part of what Kathleen Fitzpatrick refers to as ‘generous thinking’. Fitzpatrick (2019: 54) writes, ‘Rather than understanding generosity as transactional, and thus embodied in finite acts, I want to approach it as a way of being that creates infinite, unbounded, ongoing obligation’. This approach was embodied in practice, from the perspective of the co-authors, in our conversations with Zandra Yeaman, the University of Glasgow Hunterian Museum’s Curator of Discomfort, and a central figure in the creation of the Museum’s ‘Declaration of Discomfort’ ⁴ which locates historical enquiry in the context of a recognition of historical complicity in the legacies of colonialism. Significantly, the Declaration situates the curators, archives and material resources, the museum’s leadership team and university partners, in ongoing relationship and reflection regarding its legacy and contemporary responsibilities in ways that resonate strongly with testimonial empathy.

We suggest that through ontological commitments to relationality and the recognition of interdependency as integral to social relations, the disruption and subversion of the legacies of colonialism and white supremacist patriarchal norms is deep care work that is everyone’s responsibility. Indeed, ‘decolonial options start from the principle that the regeneration of life shall prevail over primacy of the production and reproduction of goods at the cost of life’ (Mignolo, 2009: 161). All too often this work is disproportionately displaced onto minoritized and racialized communities and displaced by other academic priorities. Emphasising the vital reckoning with this displacement of responsibility, we reiterate Gabriel’s (2017: 33) argument that, ‘In order to transform the institutional culture within academia to one that is culturally democratic and equitable, White students and staff need to become active participants in challenging Whiteness’. Anti-racism is easy to sign up to but/and/also demands practice; its ‘doing’ and ‘knowing’ require a willingness to ‘being’ differently: ‘[a]nti-racist pedagogy is not a ready-made product that professors can apply to their course. . . This self-reflection requires faculty to have the humility to know that they are a work in progress, both as individuals and as professors/scholars/researchers’ (Kishimoto, 2018: 543). Thus, anti-racist work requires a willingness to be changed by it; staying curious with the unknown that is trying to come to light rather than reorienting the critique to fit within the existing dominant forms of knowing and being. We contend that empathy is integral to anti-racist pedagogies because it centres relationality, emotions and bodies in critical and reflective learning, and it has the capacity to disrupt our epistemic horizons to reveal complicity in colonial practices. In conclusion, we suggest that institutional policies and practices in the academy need to take seriously the ontological and epistemological challenge embodied by the politics of empathy in order to better address and repair the harms of systemic racism.