Introduction: Conversations on Empathy. Interdisciplinary perspectives on imagination and radical othering

We are living in challenging times. In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, one can feel pessimistic and hopeless, and rightly so, as such events seem to become increasingly normalised. In the public and political arena many have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. Perhaps nowhere have these calls for empathy been more visible than in Barack Obama’s warning that the US is undergoing an “empathy-deficit” which needs to be urgently solved. In Obama’s address to the 2006 graduating class at Northwestern University he beseeched to his young audience: “There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit — the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us — the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room” (Obama as cited in Northwestern Online News 2006). As elsewhere in the public domain, empathy is evoked here as the solution to a society fraught with divisions and inequality. As noted by feminist scholar Carolyn Pedwell, such calls often revolve around the “refrain of how to cultivate empathy” (2016, p. 3, Pedwell this volume) rather than on the more basic and contentious questions of what exactly empathy is and what it can and cannot do. What is left out from such public debates are discussions about what empathy´s cognitive, experiential, and political facets are. How, if at all, can a better understanding of empathy help us face the social, economic and political challenges that lie ahead? Is greater empathy what we really need at this point in time of planetary crisis?