In recent years, fields like posthumanism, ecocriticism and critical animal studies have repeatedly discussed “[...] how the richness and complexity of non-human experience can be conveyed in a narrative that was created by a human mind” (Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies, 111). To delineate the boundary between a “[...] potentially transformative mode [...] of access to the emotional lives of our non-human kin” (Welling qtd. ibid., 113) and an “[...] anthropomorphism that denies an animal’s [or non-human] authenticity [...]” (Darnbrough, Multispecies Ethopoetics, 9) appears at times impossible. And yet, empathy is central to narrative engagement with the non-human world as “an experience which rather than eliminating the difference between self-experience and other-experience takes the asymmetry to be a necessary and persisting existential fact” (Zahavi, "Empathy and Other-Directed Intentionality", 138f.).

This seminar proposes to address interspecies empathy as a relational mode of affective and imaginative engagement with the non-human “an-other” (Palacios, Inside the Whale, 161) that exists in complex entanglements with questions of interspecies communication, (post)colonial and neoliberal constellations and a growing awareness of a shared state of perpetual vulnerability (see for example Butler, Precarious Life).  We understand empathy as a possible affective mode in a “relationship with alterity” (ibid., 161-2). We then want to ask how empathy emerges under specific material conditions and how it helps in developing critical (counter)discourses based on the interplay between communication across species and its failure as a way of relating to something radically inaccessible (see Leslie Jamison’s famous essay 52 Blue). How, for example, do material conditions structure the emergence of empathy in narrative refractions of interspecies encounters? How does empathy function in the cultural production of original inhabitants and how does it transform when adapted to the demands of literary/media markets? Which mutations does interspecies empathy undergo between historical periods and geographical regions? How does the concept overlap with feminist and decolonial epistemologies? Which role do ecosystems and a sense of place play in the emergence of empathy? Does growing climate change awareness contribute to a rise in narratives of interspecies empathy and an understanding of a shared state of being-at-risk? And how does interspecies empathy emerge in a de-centered and digitalized global media space?

We welcome submissions relating to any of these or further related questions. We are particularly interested in setting off on a joint exploration of interspecies empathy from an inter-philological perspective in order to pursue converging tendencies in the ecocritical study of different world regions. Further, we welcome submissions focusing on all forms of narrative media such as literature, film, theater, digital archives, video games etc.