Narrative Empathy

Great content for great causes.

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Beautiful 30 second fundraising animation by Noma Bar for the World Food Programme.

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Heart-rending film of a journey from Syria aired on Channel 4 News tonight.

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How can comics cultivate empathy for charities?

“We all live in a state of profound isolation. No other human being can ever know what it’s like to be you from the insi…

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Doctors Without Hospitals

President Obama should support an independent international investigation of the airstrikes on a medical compound in Kunduz that killed 22 people.

An op-ed by MSF appearing in the New York Times: “Crucial to recognize, identify, assign responsibility for International Humanitarian Law violations when they do occur” 

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Rationality is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that the result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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Striking new film from Plan. Is this the way charities should communicate?

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Olivier Kugler describes the life of refugees he met in the Domiz camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. The work was commissioned by Médecins Sans Frontières and published in Harpers. See more work like this at Narrative Empathy.

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Millport Marine Station is a fieldwork centre on the island of Great Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland. Nathan Budd’s film was produced to showcase its community and educational value when the status of future funding was in question. In May 2014 a £4m package was announced to fund a comprehensive programme of development and refurbishment over the next five years.

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Dubai construction workers protest.

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Comics are such a peculiar way of mediating the world(s in your head). In McLuhan's term, comics are a "cool" medium, meaning that they are a low-information form that require the reading to "fill in the blanks" - to participate in the thing in order to extract meaning.  This was developed by McCloud into the instance of "closure" - the space between the panels is the space where we ourselves do the work of transitions between one panel and the next. We are guided into understanding the events between the events. (Film is a "hot" medium that does all that brain work for you...)

Warren Ellis, Orbital Operations, 27th Sept. 2015

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Read the rest of Karrie Fransman’s comic, produced for the Red Cross, at Narrative Empathy.

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Cultivating Empathy

Empathy comes from emotional and rational understanding. Our content addresses both. We stir feelings with stories, experiences and images, and appeal to reason with argument, data and context. The combination is enlightening, and a more sustainable and potent driver of change than shock, guilt or emotive coercion could ever be.

Learn more at narrative-empathy.com