REIMAGINING AND REMEMBERING THE OTHER: NARRATIVE EMPATHY AND ITS LIMITATIONS
Fårö, Sweden, 29 July–5 August 2018
Sunday 29 July: Arrival and Registration
Monday 30 July
Session 1: Theorising Empathy and Otherness
Welcome and introductions (Eneken Laanes, Hanna Meretoja and Anna Reading)
Anna Reading: Moving Hearts: On Making, Telling, Hearing and Walking Stories of Migranthood
Hanna Meretoja: Engaging with the Other: Empathy and Perspective-Taking
Colin Davis: Encountering the Other (Without Empathy)
Session 2: Philosophy and Empathy
Matt Phillips: Empathy in Curves and Spirals: Roland Barthes, Bertolt Brecht, and S/Z
Katherine Mitchell: Navigating Identity Fragility: Dislocated Identification
Anahit Poturyan: Virtual Reality and Philosophical Approaches to Empathy
Tuesday 31 July
Session 3: Empathy and the novel
Suvi Lahtonen: Romance as an aesthetic mode in Finnish war fiction: self-empathy in historical fiction in Laila Hietamies’ (Hirvisaari) Snows of Oblivion and Jörn Donner’s Angela’s War
Fahimeh Qasemnezhad: Empathic Unsettlement and the Secondary Witness in Pat Barker’s Another World
Nanny Jolma: Grotesque features and their ambiguous meanings in Bo Carpelan´s novel Benjamins bok
Su (Sophie) Yu-wen Estranging Emotions: Jane’s Reasoning Forgiveness in Jane Eyre
Session 4: Testimonies and Biographies
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki: Biography and Empathy
Jung Eun Seo: My Pain Residing in Other’s Body: Testimony, Narrative Empathy, and the Construction of Social Suffering
Sophie Kelly: Weaving Fictions, Threading Truths: Biographical Fiction between Borders
Wednesday 1 August
Session 5: Engaging with the Other in Film Narratives
Kimi Kärki: Imagine the Talking Machines: Emotional ‘other’ in AI Voices of Visionary Science Fiction Films
Marta Cenedese: The Failures of Film: Reimagining Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française
Niina Oisalo: When the Others Strike Back: Palimpsestic Memory and Tricksters in Documentary Storytelling in El escarabajo de oro, or Victorias Hamnd
Session 6: Imagining the Other Across Media
Aura Nikkilä and Anna Vuorinne: Visualising Others’ Stories. Creating Empathy through Graphic Storytelling in Hanneriina Moisseinen’s The Isthmus
Per Roar: “Performing Time: Remembering the Other, Choreographing Empathy”
Eneken Laanes: Empathy in Kristina Norman’s video art
Thursday 2 August: The Excursion Day
Friday 3 August
Session 7: Holocaust and Perpetrator Fiction
Unni Langås: Encounters with the Other: Narrative Empathy in John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Helena Duffy: Can a Nazi be a ‘Postmodern Nihilist’? Narrative Empathy in Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes Revisited
Session 8: Molly Andrews: Keynote (TBA)
Saturday 4 July
Session 9: Narrative as a Method: Engaging with vulnerability and violence
Rebecca Rosenberg: Imagining the Mentally Ill Other in Emma Santos, Linda Lê, and Chloé Delaume.
Kerttu Lehto: Studying the collective memories and recreating them in an elderly house, by using storytelling and larp as methods
Laura Mishelle Muñoz González: Aesthetics and memory narratives, reflexivity as researcher in Mexico
Aura Lounasmaa: Creating the other through victim narratives in women’s advocacy
Session 10: The Ethics and Politics of Empathy and Compassion
Silvia Pierosara: Empathy vs. compassion? Towards an ethics of reflecting vulnerability
Anna Lindhé: Narrative Empathy and the Creation of the Other: Towards a New Ethics of Reading Literature
Sonjeong Cho: “Emphatic Feminism and the Politics of “Beside””
Andreea Ritivoi: Power and Pity: The Historical and Political Roots of the Narrative of Refugee Assistance
5 August: Departure
Narrative & Memory 