is only extreme pessimists like McFee who share Fodor’s belief that the most we can get from neuroscience is an implementation model. Empathy: Its Value in Film Experience Empathy plays a central role in Smith’s account of the nature of film reception
“Mind the Gap”
Between Movies and Mind, Affective Neuroscience, and the Philosophy of Film
Jane Stadler
representation and expression of emotion in film. My particular interest is in the account Smith advances of the nature of emotion and its role in relation to empathy and imagination in the film experience. As Smith contends, quantitative empirical research adds
Selective Empathy
Workers, Colonial Subjects, and the Affective Politics of French Romantic Socialism
Naomi J. Andrews
community. Socialists’ inconsistent empathy with various subjugated groups in the French body politic are acutely apparent when we examine their positions on key metropolitan and imperial issues during the July Monarchy, especially colonial slavery, wage
Ta' Pinu
Ritualised Empathy on the Doorstep of Heaven
Philip Kao
This article explores the miracles and ex-votos (votive offerings) associated with the Ta' Pinu shrine on Gozo, Malta's northernmost island. Drawing from ethnographic data, analysis of various personal accounts, and observations of people's interactions with the bricolage of Ta' Pinu ex-votos, I seek to show that Gozitans perform a highly personal yet ritualised form of empathy in the context of miracle worship. The miracles associated with Ta' Pinu are thus seemingly 'contagious' and meaningful, because they elicit existential connections and reflections on the nature of supplication and Gozitan social relations.
The "Moving" Image
Empathy and Projection in the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool
Silke Arnold-de Simine
The moving image has become ubiquitous in museums that deal with traumatic, violent, and difficult histories and could be described as "memorial museums." This article investigates exhibition practices in the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, in which large-scale video installations provide evocative recreations of traumatic experiences that are designed to unsettle and disturb visitors, providing them with a visceral and vicarious experience that calls for witnessing and "empathic unsettlement." It also queries the assumption that the capacity for empathy forms the basis for responsible moral agency, and whether museums aiming to encourage social responsibility should rely on such technologies.
Showcasing Dictatorship
Memory and the Museum in Argentina and Chile
Jens Andermann
This article compares two recently inaugurated museums dedicated to the period of dictatorial terror and repression in the Southern Cone: the Museum of Memory and Human Rights at Santiago, Chile (opened in 2009), and the Museum of Memory at Rosario, Argentina (2010). Both museums invoke in their very names the "memorial museum" as a new mode of exhibitionary remembrance of traumatic events from the past. They seek to sidestep the detachment and "objectivity" that has traditionally characterized historical museum displays in favor of soliciting active, performative empathy from visitors. Neither of the two institutions, however, complies entirely with the memorial museum's formal characteristics; rather, they reintroduce modern museographical languages of history and art, thus also challenging the emergent "global canon" of memorial museum aesthetics.
Educating Educators of Memory
Reflections on an InSite Teaching Program
Joanne Sayner
This article reports on a continuing professional development program run by the Imperial War Museum in London for educators involved in teaching about European memories. On the basis of two sites visited in Hungary which were elements of the educational program, the Memorial Shoes on the Danube Promenade and the Memento Statue Park, this article suggests that Alison Landsberg's concept of prosthetic memory can be applied to these sculptural monuments. It explores the political potential of empathy in transmitting diverse European pasts and of mapping individual performative responses to less familiar cultural contexts.
Joerg Fingerhut
relation to social interactions (as, e.g., in the case of empathy). He, therefore, does not fully address in which ways they become re-appropriated in our interactions with cultural artifacts and factor in our appreciation of these artifacts. Following
Whitewashing History
Pinker’s (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence
Philip Dwyer
Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, Empathy, and the Reduction of Violence It is true that the period in history known as the Enlightenment, roughly from the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, is a watershed moment in the history of
The Cine-Fist
Eisenstein’s Attractions, Mirror Neurons, and Contemporary Action Cinema
Maria Belodubrovskaya
“rather than being an involvement with narrative action or empathy with character psychology, the cinema of attractions solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the viewer’s curiosity” (1995: 121). Arguing against the myth that