Empathy in Action: Critical Perspectives from the Arts and Humanities

ARTS & HUMANITIES INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLOQUIUM

(Please read the full CfP before sending a proposal)

Deadline for abstract submissions: 20 March 2026
Notifications of acceptance: by 01 April 2026

Date: 10 June 2026
Venue: Clothworkers’ Building South, University of Leeds, Woodhouse, Leeds, LS2 9JT, Room 3.12
(Fully catered event)

Funding:
WRoCAH and UKRIfunded
Travel grants available (non-funded applicants only)

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Aims and Scope of the Colloquium

Empathy is having a moment. Across politics, education, healthcare, activism, and technology, it is widely promoted as a solution to social division, injustice, and moral failure. Yet critical scholarship increasingly challenges this celebratory consensus, insisting that empathy is neither neutral nor inherently ethical. Rather, empathy is shaped by power, education, and social positioning, and may just as readily reinforce hierarchy, bias, or paternalism as dismantle them.

This interdisciplinary colloquium brings together scholars from across the Arts and Humanities to examine empathy not simply as a moral virtue, but as a practice, a method, and a political technology. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, philosophical, literary, historical, and cultural theory, Empathy in Action asks how empathy is produced, mobilised, constrained, and resisted across different contexts.

Recent work in psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that empathy often operates selectively, privileging the familiar and emotionally proximate while obscuring structural injustice. At the same time, contemporary applications of empathy—whether in humanitarian discourse, artificial intelligence, criminal justice, or cultural interpretation—raise urgent questions about ethical limits, misrecognition, and responsibility. As global crises intensify and humanitarian commitments weaken, the cultural work that empathy performs demands renewed critical scrutiny.

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Key Questions

The colloquium seeks to explore questions such as:

• How does empathy function—and malfunction—as a method of interpretation in the humanities?

• In what ways is empathy shaped by ideology, race, gender, class, and power?

• When might distance, refusal, opacity, or restraint be more ethical than identification?

• How does empathy operate in humanitarian, postcolonial, or global frameworks, and with what consequences?

• What alternatives to empathy—solidarity, responsibility, justice, care—are offered by critical traditions?

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Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Empathy as method in literary, historical, and cultural analysis

• The politics of feeling: affect, power, and emotional governance

• Empathy, bias, and ethical limits

• Humanitarianism, compassion fatigue, and spectacle

• Empathy in postcolonial and global contexts

• Artificial, instrumental, or “performed” empathy

• Reading others, misrecognition, and speaking for versus with

• Critiques of empathy and arguments against empathic identification

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Submission Guidelines

Please submit:

• An abstract of no more than 250 words

• A biographical note of up to 200 words

• Submissions should be made by 20 March 2026 to info@empathyinaction2026.co.uk

The colloquium welcomes contributions from across the Arts and Humanities and encourages interdisciplinary approaches.

Full details are available at:
www.empathyinaction2026.co.uk