Post-Humanitarianism and the Crisis of Empathy

Abstract

The constant mediatization of conflict, violence, and suffering has created a feeling of “compassion fatigue” (Möller 1999; Sontag 2003) among viewers who consume images of “distant suffering” from the safe space of their own living rooms (Boltanski 1993; Chouliaraki 2006, 2013). This has prompted not only a sense of context collapse (Marwick and boyd 2011) but also a crisis of empathy. How should we respond to, and continue to engage with, disasters, underdevelopment, pandemics, and political conflicts, as part of multiple competing worlds of short-term and long-term humanitarian crises? The booming virtual reality (VR) industry has broken new ground as allegedly the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk 2015; Bailenson 2018; Uricchio 2018; Raessens 2019) which puts the viewer in other people’s shoes. VR as a unique and novel form of “immersive technologies” has been postulated as a “technology of feelings,” a good technology that promotes compassion, connection, and intimacy by allowing the viewer to experience the lives of those who are distant others. e.g., migrants or refugees. This chapter explores the enthusiasm, but also the ethi- cal reservations, surrounding this new media genre of post-humanitarian appeal through the analysis of some VR projects dealing with migration and refugee is- sues, namely Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria (2012), Gabo Arora and Chris Milk’s Clouds over Sidra (2015), Ben C. Solomon and Imraan Ismail’s The Displaced, (2015), and Tamara Shogaolu’s Queer in a Time of Forced Migration (2020).