Windows of Empathy: Creating Mediated Spaces for Education and Dialogue
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Dialogue and Difference
2.1. Teachable Moments? How and Where to Take a Stand
2.2. Who Can Speak? Intersectionality and Marginalization
I can attest to the fact that a strange confluence of pressure built up around me in the decades after 9/11, wherein I became the “Muslim Woman” made to emblematize both the exception to the rule of Muslim fundamentalism in western academic locations, as well as to be looked at with suspicion for harboring sentiments which, because they were at odds with the US-Zionist machine of Empire, rendered me unpatriotic (hence a traitor) in the eyes of many.
3. Publics and Precarities
3.1. Conflict and Complexity: Living with Difference Next Door
3.2. Silenced and Subordinate: Muted Group Theory
4. Spaces, Places, and Promises
4.1. Moving from the Margins
A lot of this zealous police work makes sense. Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginal. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it. They’ve demanded to be taken seriously, and now that they kind of are, they can’t not act. This territory was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any cost. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy—not directly. They can, however, amend the culture. But as urgent as these correctives, cancellations, pre-emptions and proscriptions may be, they do start to take a toll.
saw the ‘mechanized’ media as replacing ordinary face-to-face conversation. Such conversations since Socrates had helped equip free individuals to build free societies by examining many points of view. Instead we were to be increasingly dominated by a single point of view in print and electronic media: the view of the imperial centre.
Patterns of colonialism, along with raced and/or gendered hate are continuous occurrences, sometimes even our daily experience. It is important that we continue to decode our experiences of ‘respectable spaces’ and our journeys through the racialized and gendered hate we experience in them … Sharing our stories is the only way to create an opportunity to transform these spaces into ones that respect all people.(p. 30)
4.2. Entertainment and Art as Avenues to Empathy
safer art and discourse that provokes and disturbs and shocks less. It gives us culture whose artistic value has been replaced by moral judgment and leaves us with monocriticism. This might indeed be a kind of social justice. But it also robs us of what is messy and tense and chaotic and extrajudicial about art.
5. Conclusions: Coming Together
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
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Hirji, F. Windows of Empathy: Creating Mediated Spaces for Education and Dialogue. Genealogy 2024, 8, 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030108
Hirji F. Windows of Empathy: Creating Mediated Spaces for Education and Dialogue. Genealogy. 2024; 8(3):108. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030108
Chicago/Turabian StyleHirji, Faiza. 2024. "Windows of Empathy: Creating Mediated Spaces for Education and Dialogue" Genealogy 8, no. 3: 108. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030108