#narrative empathy

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One-day workshop Sunday 8 October: Registration now open!

One-day workshop Sunday 8 October: Registration now open!

I’m teaching a one-day workshop for Clarion West on Sunday 8 October, 10am-4pm: What Readers Like—And Why. It will be held in an accessible space (I will most probably be in a wheelchair) in the U District of Seattle, and costs $150. Fourteen participants will be selected on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration is open.

I’ll be asking students to do a bit of pre-work, no more than 20…

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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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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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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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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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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