Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Emotion

Empathy is today framed as affective panacea to a wide range of international social ills. While Barack Obama has called on Americans to address the nation's 'empathy deficit' and feel for those who are struggling, both inside and outside the nation (2006: 67-8), feminist and anti-racist theorists have long argued that 'engagement based on empathy' is integral to fostering 'social justice' and 'solidarity' transnationally (Alexander and Mohanty,1997: xlii). This Fellowship project explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary affective injunction to 'be empathetic' and their complex transnational implications. Through close analysis of a range of popular and scholarly 'affective texts' - including Obama's political memoirs and speeches, postcolonial literary and cultural works, best-selling business books, international development literatures, popular science writing, and feminist, anti-racist and queer theory - it employs a critical feminist perspective to investigate the possibilities, risks and contradictions of figuring empathy as a tool for engendering transnational social justice. As my monograph and journal article will argue, although empathy may enable transformative social connections, it can also reconstitute gendered, racialised, sexualised and classed hierarchies on a global scale. As such, we need to pay critical attention to empathy's uneven political effects.

Opening up ways of thinking empathetic politics that take us beyond universalist calls to 'put oneself in the other's shoes', I examine empathy's dynamic relationship to processes of location, translation and imagination. This involves exploring the ways that emotions are radically shaped by relations of history, power and violence in the context of postcoloniality, globalisation and neoliberalism, and fleshing out the possibilities and limitations of 'affective translation' across cultural, geo-political and temporal contexts. Moving away from liberal and neoliberal narratives which invest empathetic perspective-taking with a near magical power to bridge all differences and heal all wounds, the project considers how 'alternative empathies' might offer new and transformative ways of thinking - and feeling - the links between emotion, affect and social change in a transnational frame. It will contribute to an affective theory and politics which do not view emotions instrumentally as sources of, or solutions to, complex social, political and economic problems, but rather examine diverse and shifting relations of feeling for what they might tell us about the affective workings of power, and the emergent possibilities for radical political solidarities, transnationally.

The Fellowship will enable me to disseminate my research in the UK and internationally, in North America and Australia, where there are important communities of critical scholars working on the politics of emotion. It will also allow me to further hone my research leadership skills, and bring together interdisciplinary researchers of affect, culture and politics with leading professionals and practitioners, through convening an international symposium: 'Transnational Affects: Emotions and Politics in a Global Context'. An interactive website and blog will be desgined to support the event and the research project. These activities will enable me to develop an international research network for the study of emotion and transnationality, and to generate further high quality research and publications in this field. In sum, this project seeks to develop a critical vocabulary for theorising the transnational politics of emotion, which should be of significant interest and utility to interdisciplinary scholars of emotion, affect and political relations across the humanities and social sciences, as well as key audiences outside academia, including professionals in international politics and development, social business and enterprise, and local, national and transnational media.

As discussed in 'Pathways to Impact', the proposed Fellowship project is likely to be of significant interest and utility to three key groups outside academia:

1) Institutions, practitioners and policy-makers in international politics and development:
My research looks directly at how affective rhetoric figures in professional development and training literatures created and used by Northern/Western international development agencies and transnational aid networks. Specifically, I examine writing produced by the World Bank, ActionAid and the UK Department for International Development about 'Immersions' programmes. My close analysis sheds light on some of the significant risks and contradictions of figuring empathy as a tool for social justice in a transnational context shaped by neoliberalism, and offers critical recommendations for how social theorists and development professionals alike might refigure ideologies and practices likely to reproduce dominant affective and social inequalities. I expect this work to be of interest to institutions concerned with how emotions might be mobilised and/or managed in international development practice, and to policy-makers and practitioners assessing the benefits, risks, and ethical implications of Immersions programmes. More broadly, my analysis of the links between 'affective translation' and 'cultural translation' should be highly relevant to international bodies seeking to facilitate transnational and cross-cultural communication among differently-located stakeholders.
2) Professional bodies and networks in business, enterprise and management:
In its analysis of the links between emotion, globalisation and neoliberalism, my research will be relevant to progressive professionals in the business sector. Through assessing bestselling business books, alongside research on contemporary affective norms and practices in the workplace, my monograph will examine how, and with what transnational political implications, empathy is cultivated as an affective capacity with market value in neoliberal economies. In a context in which leading professionals laud the potential of 'the empathy economy', I address the ways in which popular business 'experts', as well as multi-national corporations (such as IBM and Nike), appropriate feminist and anti-racist languages of empathy and compassion to leverage profit-making in ways that are likely to reproduce, rather than disrupt, social and geo-political hierarchies. My research is interested in how empathetic relations might work differently (and more ethically) in this context, and should therefore be useful to practitioners engaging with social enterprise and corporate social responsibility, such as Social Enterprise UK. My work is also relevant to professionals concerned with how to cultivate and/or negotiate emotions in the workplace in ways that are critically attuned to transnational cultural differences and inequalities of gender, race, sexuality class, nation - such the UK Institute for Small Business and Enterprise's (ISBE) Gender Enterprise Network (GEN).
3) Local, national and transnational media
Given the salience of rhetorics of empathy across a range of media outlets, from the BBC, to The Guardian, to Business Week, my project's interdisciplinary and transnational engagement with scholarly and popular discourses of empathy has potential to generate local, national and transnational media interest. In particular, broadcasters producing programming relating to themes of international politics, development and legacies of slavery and colonialism (i.e. Channel 4's recent documentary series, Empire) may be interested in research that links these phenomena to contemporary thinking about emotions. In the wake of the Occupy Movements, my research also resonates with on-going media interest in the current relevance of social justice movements, including feminist and anti-racist politics, and the links among media, politics and ethics.