Eirik Risberg

Senior Fellow in the cluster "Cultural memory and cultural heritage in Europe in the context of digital transformation"

My project, “Educating for democratic citizenship in a digital age: Fostering empathy in the shadows of the violent 20^th century,” examines the role empathy plays in our understanding of the past and, by extension, in educating future democratic citizens – in an age when our relation to the past is rapidly being transformed by digital technology.

The ability to empathise, roughly, to ‘assume the perspective of someone else,’ has long been considered fundamental to an understanding of the past. The concept, however, has proven notoriously difficult to define, and a longstanding concern in the literature is that one’s empathy may fail to materialise; that, in the case of the 20^th century, it may be overpowered or eroded by the sheer volume and availability of atrocity images, leaving us numb and thus unable to relate to or understand the past.

This challenge seems particularly acute in our day and age, when digital technologies have made the access to vast troves of images from the violent 20^th century readily available, and when digital reconstructions of sites of persecution, augmented reality, holograms of survivors, educational computer games and, most recently, the possibilities enabled by artificial intelligence, is fundamentally changing our relation to the past.

Some scholars, however, remain adamant that our ability to empathise is more resilient than we think – that empathy is not merely an immediate emotional response to an image or an observed situation, but more fundamentally connected to our values, self-conception and identity. On this conception, new forms of mediating the history of the 20^th century may not necessarily contribute to eroding our empathy but, on the contrary, provide opportunities for new forms of engagement with our past.

The current research project addresses these and other implications of the rapid digital transformation on empathy, and the consequences this has for the widely shared aim of fostering future democratic citizens.