The Social Terrain of "Empathy": A Preliminary Consideration

This article explores some of the ways in which "empathy" has in recent years come to be much talked about in society at large.In scholarly discourse, empathy is normally understood as a kind of vicarious experience of another person's emotional or mental state, distinct from sympathy, compassion, and other related notions.While empathy can be understood in such terms, my interest in this article is to consider empathy not as a category of emotional and cognitive experience as defined in psychology and other academic disciplines, but instead as an object of societal discourse that has come to be invested with meanings and significance that extend beyond-and at times may even conflict with-the more narrowly academic definitions of the term.The article thus maps out some of the ways in which empathy-specifically named as such-has been taken up and made a focal point of discourse and practice in society, in contexts ranging from education to healthcare to immigration.