Navigating Complexity: Empathy, Ourselves and Our Societies

At a time of deep global crisis we are living in states of uncertainty and discomfort more often than many of us can remember. What can empathy offer to our ability to navigate relationships across personal and political divides? In this talk, Dr. Naomi Head will explore what empathy is and how it is always shaped by power, consider what the costs of empathy might be when the stakes are high, and reflect on how empathy impacts our lives from the personal to the international.

MEET DR. NAOMI HEAD

Naomi Head is Professor of International Relations at the University of Glasgow in the UK and her research and teaching focuses on narratives of conflict, the politics of empathy and emotions in war and conflict, and conflict transformation. Her work has engaged with conflict in the Balkans, Israel-Palestine, the Iranian nuclear negotiations, and the coalition wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Naomi has a longstanding interest in mediation, communication, and forms of non-violence and is also an Associate Practitioner at the Centre for Good Relations which is a civic mediation organisation in Scotland/UK.

Watch the Gathering HERE

First Reading - bell hooks (1990, 152)

“No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Rewriting you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still the colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk.”

Second Reading - John F. Kennedy (June 11, 1962)
”For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears.  We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations.  We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”