“Regarding the pain of others”: urban geography after empathy

ABSTRACT

While urban geography has made significant contributions to mainstreaming disruptive thinking through its invocation of justice, less discussed is what good must our descriptions do especially when they pertain to others’ suffering. This essay addresses the ethics of practicing social inquiry by drawing two thematic lessons: painful clarity and the appropriation of space. Centering the importance of painful clarity reflects on the relational politics of plural claims-making, the ongoingness of which helps us focus not only on our everyday complicity in others’ struggles but also on what can be done here and now. The appropriation of space highlights the role of spatial milieu as a medium through which structural constraints and political agency can be situated in a specific time and place, enabling forms of social inquiries that are instrumental and operative. I conclude by suggesting three considerations that could help bridge the separation between knowledge and action.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics of social inquiry
• social justice
• relational politics
• pragmatism
• public geography
• geography education

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Robert Lake, the section editors (Andy Jonas and David Wilson), and anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and extremely helpful comments on previous drafts. Any remaining shortcomings are solely the responsibility of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is not my intention to undermine the importance of geographical work that delivers “empathetic invocation” (Lake and Zitcer, 2012); rather, the phrase “after empathy” in my title aims precisely to question how the very success of urban geography in harnessing the role of affect (in propelling moral imaginations) furthers the debate towards what can come next.

2 By “foundational” I mean precepts being accepted as axiomatic and thus requiring no justification.

3 I would like to thank a reviewer for pointing out that this aspect of re-narrating histories “from the ground-up” has also been addressed by authors such as Asef Bayat, Ananya Roy, Solomon Benjamin, Partha Chatterjee, and others. What I am suggesting here may not be substantially or conceptually different, but, in my view, freedom geographies provide concrete reflections on challenging the foundational precepts, assumptions, and values propagated by the mainstream society (e.g. “autonomy” or “human will”) starting from the ontology of what is human/less-than-human (see Jackson, 2020).