RGS-IBG Annual Conference: Decolonizing Geographical Knowledges
Royal Geographical Society, London
Tuesday 29 August - Friday 1 September 2017
Call for Papers
More-than-human geographies of empathy
Session conveners: Megan Donald (University of Glasgow), Chris Bear (Cardiff University), Rich Gorman (Cardiff University)
Geographers have been central in investigating the complications of caring for others beyond the entrenched ontological divides of human and animal, and science and emotion. Bioethical debates in more-than-human geography including those around, for example, animal experimentation (Davies, 2012), animal field science (Lorimer, 2008), animal-technology assemblages (Holloway, Bear and Wilkinson, 2013) taxidermy (Straughan, 2015) and canine vivisection (Garlick, 2015), all have one aspect in common: they reveal our ethical relations with ‘others’ as contingent, sensitive and situated. Conventional, medical-scientific approaches to bioethics, however, continue to be framed by a Western, anthropocentric understanding of care which individualises responsibility and potentially narrows the opportunities of caring for those outside particular spatial-ethical boundaries.
In this session, we wish to explore the possibilities of a more-than-human geography of empathy as a route through which to contest and ‘decolonise’ these Western medical-scientific approaches to bioethics and care. Empathy is loosely conceptualised here as the ability to put oneself in another’s position, building upon Greenhough and Roe’s (2011) notion of ‘somatic sensibility’: the shared experience of living in a vulnerable body.
Empathy in this respect is more-than-rational, affective and resists quantification. It creates what van Dooren (2014, p. 139) describes as ‘a particular sociality rooted in our being emotionally at stake in one another’s lives’ in a way of being in an unavoidably shared world with others; empathy has never been the privileged possession of humanity (van Dooren, 2014: 40). Here, then, we are interested not only in how certain humans develop or feel empathy towards nonhuman others, but also how relations of empathy might be distributed or multidirectional.
We therefore aim to create a discussion between wide-ranging contributors who engage with a more-than-human approach and whose work might decolonise Western biomedical approaches to ethics and practices of care. As such, we welcome empirical and conceptual contributions that explore more-than-human geographies of empathy through considering issues such as:
• What is empathy? And what might a more-than-human geography of empathy look like?
• Who or what is involved in empathetic relations? How do technologies inform or co-constitute feelings of empathy? How do empathetic relations extend across species divides?
• How might empathy be ‘used’ to address structural inequalities and how might it decolonise geographical knowledges?
• How does empathy influence lived practices and geographies of human-animal relationships?
• In what ways can more-than-human empathy become captured and capitalised?
• How can the notion of more-than-human empathy challenge and work within conventional bioethics and/or medical practice?
• What is an empathetic more-than-human methodology?
We welcome contributions from a range of perspectives, disciplines and approaches; in particular, we encourage submissions from those working within:
More-than-Human Geographies; Intersectional approaches such as Critical Animal Geographies
Emotional and Affective Geographies
Geographies of Health and Care
Medical Humanities
Political Ecology
STS
Paper titles and abstracts (of around 200 words) should be sent to Megan Donald ([log in to unmask]) by Tuesday 14th February 2017.
References
Davies G 2012 Caring for the multiple and multitude: Assembling animal welfare and enabling ethical critique Environment and Planning D 30 623-638
Garlick, B 2015 Not all dogs go to heaven, some go to Battersea: sharing suffering and the Brown Dog Affair Social & Cultural Geography 16 798-820
Greenhough B and Roe E 2011 Ethics, space and somatic sensibilities: comparing relationships between scientific researchers and their human and animal experimental subjects Environment and Planning D 29 47-66
Holloway L, Bear C and Wilkinson K 2013 Re-capturing bovine life: Robot–cow relationships, freedom and control in dairy farming Journal of Rural Studies 33 131-140
Lorimer J 2008. Counting Corncrakes: The Affective Science of the UK Corncrake Census. Social Studies of Science, 38 377-405
Straughan E 2015 Entangled corporeality: Taxidermy practice and the vibrancy of dead matter Geohumanities 1 363-377
van Dooren, T., 2014. Flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. Columbia University Press.
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