ePrints

Economies of empathy: Obama, neoliberalism, and social justice

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Carolyn Pedwell

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.

Abstract

This paper asks how we might theorise the politics of empathy in a context in which visions of social justice premised on empathetic engagement need to be situated within prevailing neoliberal frameworks. Through reading the ambivalent grammar of President Obama’s emotional rhetoric, I examine how it resonates in different ways both with feminist and antiracist debates about empathy and social justice and with the neoliberal discourse of the ‘empathy economy’ expressed within popular business literatures. I argue that, in framing empathy as a competency to be developed by individuals alongside imperatives to become more risk-taking and self-enterprising, Obama’s rhetoric reveals its centrist neoliberal underpinnings and risks (re)producing social and geopolitical exclusions and hierarchies. Yet, I suggest that seeing the phenomenon of ‘Obama-mania’ as produced not only within discourses of neoliberal governmentality but also through more radical intersections of empathy, hope, and imagination illustrates how empathy might be conceptualised as an affective portal to different spaces and times of social justice.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Pedwell C

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Year: 2012

Volume: 30

Issue: 2

Pages: 280-297

Print publication date: 02/06/2012

ISSN (print): 0263-7758

ISSN (electronic): 1472-3433

Publisher: Pion Ltd.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d22710

DOI: 10.1068/d22710

Altmetrics

Share