Conference Schedule 2019
Saturday, February 23, 2019, 1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Interrogating Empathy with Jabari Jawan Allen, Maritza N. Estrada, Joel Salcido, Elliot Rose Winter
Date(s): Saturday, February 23, 2019, 1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Location: Tooker, Old Main (view map)
Type(s): Panel
Genre and Form(s): Community, Pedagogy, Poetry
Tags: The Body, Other, Empathy, Trauma, Whiteness, Intersectionality
About the Session
Join four poets/ writers as they discuss the merits and shortcomings of the concept of empathy. These poets will focus on empathy as it functions in creative writing, pedagogy, performance, and currency to interrogate how these aspects affect othered bodies. How does the idea of empathy create a market for trauma? How are the performances of traumas used to placate the white gaze? Can there be new possibilities to describe and employ an empathy that is active and engaged in works, rather than the passive "feeling" of empathy that often functions only to benefit the empathizer? What wonders can we produce as a community, mindful of intersectionality, to explore the conditions that create the need for empathy and redirect them in ways that provide space for othered bodies, that provide means for which to alleviate the need for facile, inactive empathy?
