Eliciting Empathy Through Art. Transformative Approaches to Communit...

As Lederach describes in his book, The Moral Imagination. The Art and Soul of Building Peace, peacebuilding is not only based on skills and cognitive knowledge alone, but also on art; a creative and holistic process that originates in our embodied imagination. Moral imagination is thus the capacity to create new visions and ways of living for communities that are based on the challenges of the actual world. This implies an empathic integration of our imperfect humanness while also looking beyond and into further human potentials that have not yet been given the chance to flourish. We, therefore, argue in this symposium that in order to build a peaceful and beloved community we need creative approaches to transform violent and unjust structures. These approaches can lead to new understandings of interconnectedness and interdependence that help create communities based on care and empathy rather than violence and disconnection. Empathy, the process of understanding the feelings of another living being without judgement as if they could also be one’s own, is here a crucial quality to foster. In this context, we discuss, through a combination of theoretical and practical perspectives as well as through focusing on different art forms and expressions, how arts-based approaches can help to elicit empathy as an embodied and imaginative quality that can encourage vital feelings of connectedness with self, others, and the world.