Occupy empathy? Online politics and micro-narratives of suffering

Abstract

The Occupy movement has drawn attention to the political potential of online communities, and raised questions about the forms of emotional commitment that such communities engender. It has also generated a backlash, as supporters of the political-economic status quo have gone online to question or condemn the movement. This paper performs a discourse analysis of the messages left at one anti-Occupy site called We Are The 53%, in order to see whether such messages engaged with the idea that the current economic system creates unfair hardship and suffering. Surprisingly, the majority of the messages at We Are The 53% did not deny the existence of such hardship, but instead evinced a kind of superficial empathy with the suffering of others that viewed others’ misfortune as ultimately manageable. The paper thus questions the progressive political value of empathy in online spaces.

To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown

“…Indeed, in other settings, such as in the #Fight4OurHealth campaign in the USA (which addressed healthcare legislation and insurance precarity) the circulation of affecting illness narratives has been a key activist strategy (Merid 2019 ). But while sharing biographical narratives can be part of legitimate political action, empathy around others’ suffering does not always go hand in hand with structural critique, as Recuber’s ( 2015 ) study of “We are the 53%” campaign (which reacted against Occupy’s “We are the 99%” movement) showed. In fact, none of the stories I studied professed overt critique of lockdown protocols that had affected their access to healthcare.…”

And they slept happily ever after: Online interpretive repertoires on the use of benzodiazepines and z-drugs

“…Initially the dataset was coded based on recurrent themes, including statements about sleeping problems and anxiety that offer insight into how medication choices are made, tacit rules of inclusion and exclusion which prescribe what can be said and thought in relation to BZD/Z and the emergence of opposing argumentations both within and between different discussions and over time. To identify interpretative repertoires, the dataset was subsequently scrutinized for recurrent linguistic patterns of argumentation and rhetorical tools, including the organisation of talk around contrasts, repetition of words and grammatical structures, metaphors (Wetherell and Potter 1988), micro narratives or brief narrative fragments (Recuber 2015) and other discursive devices described by Wood and Kroger (2000). In the next phase, posts from different discussions were reorganised per pseudonym to explore tendencies in individuals' accounts.…”

Empathy: simple and inevitable? Development education and narratives of African poverty

“…However, empathy seems to be under-researched, perhaps because, as Pedwell ( 2012) notes, it is seen as a natural good. There is a nascent trend of exploring the transnational politics of empathy and its role in social justice (see Pedwell, 2012;Recuber, 2015), but little research about the place of empathy in development education specifically. Hence, this lacuna in the literature is an exciting opportunity to denaturalize empathy and investigate its implications, as any concept so frequently invoked should be critically probed.…”