Francesca Mezzenzana – författare

‘Raising a child is never neutral. It is always a moral project, shaped by assumptions about the kinds of people we hope children will become, the kinds of social worlds we wish to sustain, and the futures we are willing to imagine’When anthropologist Francesca Mezzenzana returned to the Ecuadorian Amazon with her children, she saw her fieldwork in a whole new light. Where she had previously observed unsupervised young children making fires, caring for babies, assisting their elders, foraging and hunting, she was now confronted with how strange her own child-centred approach appeared by comparison.A Runa relative teasingly interrupts her breastfeeding infant and the lesson is simple: other people have needs and wills too. Another brings reminders of mortality into a game of peekaboo. The point is not cruelty, but perspective. Runa children grow up understanding that life is fragile, love coexists with death, and nobody is the centre of the universe. With each startling realization, Made by the World brings memorable insights about the deeply cultural aspects of parenting and asks whether our current model of childhood is producing the societies we need.

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice.