The conversation explores how a transnational approach to feminist theory can uncover erasures of women’s experiences, and asks what happens when the current culture of commodification puts a price on everything – including empathy.
3) Your most recent work is on empathy and international development. Can you briefly outline the main premise of this work?
This work is part of a book I’m writing, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, forthcoming), that examines the potentialities and risks of figuring empathy as a tool for transnational social justice. The idea for the book started from an observation that ‘empathy’ today seems to be everywhere – and is everywhere presumed to be ‘good’.
By GWENDOLYN